


Replacement

by violetnyte



Series: Replacement [1]
Category: Starfighter (Comic)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Deimos is a cute drunk, M/M, Miscommunication, Rough Sex, Uncontrollable Feels, Unrequited Love, dubcon, so many feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-18
Updated: 2013-04-08
Packaged: 2017-12-05 18:01:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 30
Words: 66,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violetnyte/pseuds/violetnyte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deimos can't help but notice he's attracted a certain fighter's attention.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know what I'm doing or what this is. Please enjoy. I apologize for everything and nothing. Hold on to your feels.

I’m not the one he wants, but he’s going to fuck me anyway. I see the lopsided focus of his gaze on me in the mess hall and during meetings. There’s anger there, loathing, a vicious sense of jealousy. I’m only a substitute for the fighter he wants to break and the navigator he wants to protect.

We’re both broken, wounded, cut up on the inside and bleeding out where no one can see. The swath of black over the ruined half of his face, it’s something just as mysterious and alienating as my silence. He doesn’t take the eye patch off even when he’s got his cock in me. He probably takes it off to sleep, or maybe to shower, but that’s an intimacy that can’t be between us. It’s just sex, rough and awkward, because he’s trying to be cruel to take revenge, but his hands are gentle; they betray weakness.

He fucks me with his pants around his thighs, so it’s just as difficult as the rest. Maybe he thinks I like it, because I don’t say anything, or maybe he thinks I hate it. Maybe he thinks he’s gotten the better of me, when he’s pushing my face against the cold of the floor, like I wouldn’t cut his other eye out in a heartbeat. He’s not the fighter I want, but I’ll let him fuck me anyway.

By the third time it happens, he stops holding a hand over my mouth. Like I’d cry out, like I’d so much as fucking whisper to anyone other than the man who calls me mouse. He reaches instead to pull aside my bangs, and I suck at his fingers with crude suggestion. When he tries to kiss me, I refuse. He isn’t the man I want, and I’m not some soft, pretty navigator with cream skin and big wet eyes. It's just sex, slow and strange, and afterward he stays wrapped around me until the floor presses numb ache against my hips and ribs.

There isn’t a fourth time. I find excuses to end up alone with him, to make myself vulnerable, ready to be dragged off and taken, rough or gentle, however he wants, I’ll suck his cock just like I promised, but the half-there intensity of his gaze never falls on me. Maybe he realized he couldn’t get revenge by fucking me, maybe his own big-eyed navigator finally bent over. I can’t keep my eyes off him during meetings and in the mess hall, and it’s just another way in which I’m broken.

 

\----

Nothing_but_the_Rain [recorded](https://soundcloud.com/kantgirl/replacement-chapter-one) audio of this chapter!


	2. Chapter 2

“What the fuck’s gotten into you?” He snarls in the way that rushes fire through my veins. It’s like being in the cockpit with nothing but stars and death and danger, and sometimes I want to push him further, past growling and into biting just like the mad dog be pretends to be, push him just so he’ll push me back. Other times I fear if I push too hard he’ll fall, because the prattling cliché of bark being worse than bite has never been truer.

I shrug and look aside to watch the bolts and panels of the walkway pass underfoot.  I’ve been careless if he’s noticed some difference in my reverence, and it leads me to wonder what else he’s noticed.

“Don’t give me that, kiddo.” His hand beats against my shoulder.  By the soft outrush of air that follows the punch, I wonder if he’s bruised the bashed-open tenderness across his knuckles. He’s been brawling again, like always, desperate like a junkyard dog, just as wild and dangerous as always.

I shrug again and turn my head; there’s been a sound up head, just a soft whirling as one of the doors glides open. Footsteps now, approaching, and he hears them as well. It’s the sound of a fighter’s boots against the metal, and a broad shadow in a flight suit appears at the end of the corridor. It’s him, the fighter with the eye patch, the one whose hands hold me down in the dreams where I wake aching. 

We keep walking, because if there’s a fight to be had, the mad dog at my side will all too eagerly earn a few more bruises for the sake of pride. It’s the navigator who’s the cause of the blistering fury, the one with the big wet eyes and that red line of possession, the one that he’s fucking, and I wonder if that scarred mouth sucks cock just as prettily as the Reliant flies. I wonder if he’s half as good as the little mouse. He’s got the mouth for it, pert and pink, not wide and flat like my own, and his lips are the ones with the scar, not mine. It’s been a long time since we were raw recruits.

Their shoulders bump, intentionally, but nothing comes of it. We keep walking and so does he, the lopsided gaze straight ahead as if our presence is as unremarkable as the filtered oxygen in the air. Through a sideways gaze I see him enter the simulation room. There isn’t much I don’t notice, which is why the dog has use of a mouse in the first place.

It’s only a ways further ahead that we part ways. He’s heading to the docking bay where his navigator waits, and I turn aside as if needing to return to the fighter’s base. His hand finds my shoulder with another light blow, just one last push. “Snap the fuck out of it, myshonok. I’m not telling you again.”

Only when I’m sure he’s gone do I dare pursue my quarry. The door to the sim room slides open, but there’s only the dull hum of the machines within. The screens glow across the empty room. I turn to leave and he’s there, somehow directly behind me, when I hadn’t heard the ring of his boots against the floor or the shift of his uniform. Without intending to I take a step back, but I refuse to consider the action a retreat.

“It’s you,” he says. His voice is softer than the other fighters, more like a navigator’s hushed up refinement, and I think of my own navigator’s likewise incongruity. It’s an odd comparison to be making.

I look aside.

He steps into the room. The door glides shut behind him with ominous finality and my heart beats faster in response. I’ve become aroused just thinking of the past three times and all the restless nights since. Seeing the mad dog must have provoked him, set into him all that old fury and jealousy. I saw it on his face in the corridor. I knew he was broken inside, just like me. I knew he’d want my mouth on him just like I promised.

“Did you follow me?” he asks.

I nod.

“Why?”

He’s close enough now to touch. I run my hand over the glossed lines of the flight suit at his crotch, the meaning clear.

Something strange passes over his face. The eye patch ruins the gesture, and the scars beneath the concealing shadow sometimes pull his features in unintended directions. “No,” he says.

I flick my eyes over his face and grope him again, insistent, seductive, wanting to be fucked. I want my mouth on him, I want him to fill me, to pull my hair and fuck me hard so I’m bruised and gagging like a new recruit all over again. I want to hear him snarl. I want to feel his bite. I want a scar of my own.

He shudders beneath my hand with evident desire. I hold the half-shade quality of his stare and run my tongue over my lips. His cock jumps again, and then his hands are on me. He grabs my shoulders and spins me into the wall. I slapped my palms to the metal and spread my legs. He’s up against me, breathing in my ear, hips pressing, cock jutting through layers of clothing. He’s strong, so strong, holding me in place. I’m hard with instant, aching need.

“Why would you let someone do this to you?” The words tickle as his mouth moves over the arched crest of my ear. “Why?”

I turn my face into the accusation, but he shoves me to the wall again. There’s no gentleness in his hands this time, which is something I understand but am confused by all the same. I keep my head down, eager to please, ready to get fucked against the wall if that’s the way he wants to do it.

The pressure lifts. From behind me comes the sound of a fighter’s boots against the floor. I whirl around to see the back of him disappearing behind the hushed glide of the door.

 


	3. Chapter 3

His are the first set of eyes to find me after I leave the simulation room. I know his face but not his task name, but it doesn’t matter in the least. He’s dark like shadow and dangerous with a cruel mouth and a flat, twice-broke nose. I catch his stare, hold it, shape it into a sneering taunt, and turn my back on him. My hips sway with calculated precision. I hear a fighter’s boots against the floor, following me.

It’s just a storage room, some nook with ridged cargo boxes and piss poor lighting. I pause at the door long enough to look back at him. I catch his stare, hold it, and turn my mouth up as if to ask, _who the fuck are you, staring at my ass?_

He’s wearing leather fingerless gloves, and they smell like wicked malice when he presses them to my mouth. Normally I might fight him on that, because I’m not some dumb recruit to let himself get trapped in a storage room and cry foul, but not this time. I want him to hold me down, cover my mouth, and be clumsy enough to think this is cruel.

He slams me to the wall and grinds his hips. He’s half-hard and growing, but I’m rock hard, still weeping with it after the tease of the sim room. “You’re such a fucking slut,” he growls. He fumbles a brutality over the crotch of my uniform.

I smile behind the press of his hand. If that’s what he wants me to be, a slut, some whore on his knees, that’s fine. So long as he does it hard and makes me forget whatever strangeness it is that I feel watching the fighter with the eye patch walk away.

He pulls his hand from my mouth. I lower my head slightly, demure but with a gleaning leer. Showing him I can be a slut, if that’s what he wants. There’s a flash of motion, a slap of leather on skin, and my head jerks to the side with a brilliant flare of pain. His hand returns the other way, cracking across my jaw, and then he’s bending me over. He twists my arm into my back and snarls, like he’s broken me, like I wasn’t already broken.

I spit blood into the ridges of the cargo box and feel a rising fury. Every knife hidden on my body glows red hot with the violent urge to show this asshole what happens when a mouse fights back. He rips at the waistband of my uniform, shoving the nuisance of fabric around my knees, and I spit another mouthful of blood.

That wet-slick sound of the frothy blood is the only one that escapes my lips as he bucks forward, cock sliding against my thigh, not yet in me because he’s still only half-hard. Fucker can’t get up until he’s hurt me, seen me hurting. He’s one of those types. I wonder how his nose got broken. I hope it was from brawling a junkyard dog.

His hand slaps my ass. “Slut, you like this. You’re dripping for it.”

I should have waited for a second set of eyes to find me, or maybe waited forever until the lopsided dark gaze of a different fighter glared at me again from across the meeting room. Instead I spread my thighs and arch against him. I can be a slut, if that’s what he wants. Some whore on his knees, raw and beaten like a new recruit, gagging without a sound. I can be that for him, since I’m broken, just like his nose, but I’m the one who’s cut up and bleeding.

He chuckles and twists my arm harder. If he breaks it I won’t be much fucking good against the ‘Terons, so I struggle and kick at last. His cock jumps against my thigh, velvet dark like the rest of him, because this is what he wants, the sick fuck, he wants to see me struggle.

I’m the slut who only thinks he wants it hard, that’s the game he wants to play, so I stomp the heel of my boot against the top of his foot and earn a yowling curse for the effort. I twist free of his hold and throw an elbow into his gut. I spit blood again, right in his face, and glare like the mad dog I want rather than the mouse I am.

The force of the blow spins me back around, and I grip my hands into the ridges to keep from sliding to the floor in a daze. He’s ready now, hot and eager. He falls against my back, crushing me, panted breath against my ear. One hand finds my hair, pulling my bangs, getting a good and firm hold so tight that it brings tears to my eyes. The other hand fumbles around between us, positioning, invading, fondling, spreading, hasty and rough. He’s almost too excited to find my ass with his cock, and it’s no wonder I can’t remember his task name if his aim’s that poor. 

He jerks up on my hair as he rams forward. He goes at it with deep, grunting thrusts, searing, electrifying, and the air leaves my lungs in a rush. The sound, small and broken as it is, disappears into the slap of flesh on flesh as he pumps like it’s some goddamn race. I’m limp against the cargo box, pinned and held by him, but there’s no clumsy gentleness to it, no strange slowness that ends with my hips and ribs pressing the floor.

The leather of his gloves glides against my lower back, like he’s some artist leaving a signature, before he grabs my hip and bends me to him with crushing brutality. His fingers dig bruises, but the smoky hue of my bastard skin swallows them into shadow.

“Ah! Fuck! Fuck!” He’s loud about it, shouting at the cargo boxes like they need to hear him come. He’s filling me with loathing. It drips down the inside of my thighs when he pulls free. My knees are shaking with shameful weakness, like it’s my first time, only this time I’m not half-blinded with blood from a busted face, whimpering like some scared, stupid little boy.

When he releases my hair I let my face fall into the ridges. I’m plastered to the cargo box like a wet shirt. He backs away and I hear the sound of fabric shucking against skin, of a belt clasping, of things being over. I pull myself upright. I don’t know why I’m shaking like this.

He grabs my shoulder and throws me to the floor.  His boot finds my stomach, ribs, kidneys, hard, cruel, just like his sneering mouth promised, just like what the slutty mouse thought he wanted. He leans close. “Listen, you—“

It’s just a small flurry of motion, my hand flicking into my boot and back out again. The metal handle whirls apart, exposing the steel gleam of the blade, and folds neat and tidy into my ready palm. I slash upward and leather parts like a laser into a ship’s hull. Blood flecks across the floor.

He reels back with a cry, shocked that the mouse bit back. It was only a nip, just enough to trim his claws. I wave the knife between us. _Tsk, tsk._

It’s a bluff, since at that moment I’m trembling too much to find my feet, let alone stand, but I arrange myself against the floor in a ready crouch all the same. Like maybe this is my battle stance, like I do all my fighting on my hands and knees, like some whore. I smile and feel the blood swell into the split skin of my lip. Maybe it’ll form a scar, and then I’ll have a good excuse to kill him.

“You’re fucking crazy,” he says. He licks at the cut across the back of his hand. He takes one step away and then another. He’s trying not to run. The door to the storage room glides open at his back, and then he’s gone.

The knife slips from my shaking hands. I bow over my boots with a sigh. There’s a mess of blood and sex across the floor and splattered against the cargo box, and I’m just sitting in it with unsteady hands and weak knees like some goddamn new recruit.


	4. Chapter 4

I drift through the fighter base in something of a daze. With my head down to hide the bruises and blood, no one gives me a second look. Few people notice a little grey mouse. It’s why I’m useful. I pick my way carefully, not wanting to brush against any of the other fighters. The lift up to the dormitories is crowded. I wedge myself into the corner and force my arms to hang loose at my side. They want to wrap over the ache in my belly and chest, as if to hold myself together, like I can gather the pieces in my arms and glue them into place.

One of the other fighters looks at me too long. I should have waited for his eyes. He’s got a long, straight nose and a hard little mouth. He looks brittle but not sharp, mean but not cruel, but I get off at on the wrong floor at the last minute just to escape his eyes. I walk quick, almost like panic, and glance over my shoulder to make sure I’m not being followed.

“Oh!” says the little navigator when I run directly into him. His tablet falls to the floor with a dangerous clatter but does not break, at least.  I go down as well, sprawling messily in such a way that shivers pain up my spine. I don’t break either, since I’m already broken. Navigators’ boots aren’t nearly as loud against the floors of the Sleipnir.

“Oh, no! I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you. I was reading—“ The navigator scurries to his hands and knees to grab the tablet and then offers me a hand up as well.

He’s stupid like a new recruit. I could be dangerous, some snarling mad dog, rather than a timid little mouse. He’s got big round eyes, a big round nose, and a tousle of pale hair, all cream-colored and docile-looking like the other, the one with the scar. I wonder if he’s bent over for his fighter yet, and then I wonder who is fighter is. I hope it’s not the dark one with the twice-broke nose. It’s the most kindness I can think to offer for the courteous way he grips my hand and pulls me to my feet.

“Oh,” he says again. His eyes go even bigger and rounder, like two moons sucked into his face. “Oh, you’re hurt!”

This is nothing. I’ve been hurt worse. I turn my face so the long fall of my bangs comes forward to conceal the bulk of the damage.

He says nothing for a moment and then; “My room’s just here. Would you like to come wash your face?” He speaks with quiet compassion, and I wonder who’s beaten him to put such empathy into his offer. I hope it’s not his fighter.

I accept the offer because he’s harmless, a fluffy lamb for the slaughter, and I hope his fighter isn’t someone like a junkyard dog or a broke-nosed shadow. The plain dorm he leads me to gives no clue as to the identity of the two men who occupy it. They haven’t been here long enough to accumulate much more than a damp towel on the dresser.

“The bathroom’s just here,” he says. “Go ahead.”

I step around him cautiously and enter the little tiled chamber. The rooms are all alike on the Sleipnir, cramped and impersonal. A grimy bar of soap balances between two shaving razors on the counter. Their handles are turned together without touching. I purposefully avoid looking at my reflection as I run the faucet scalding.

Steam rises from the growing pool of water in the sink. I cup my hands into water, and it’s so hot that it stings. I splash my face and watch pinkish rivulets cloud the water with blood. My hands are still shaking, and I want them to stop. Water gushes out of the faucet. Steam rises. I turn off the water but stay bent over the sink. I feel sick. Weak. Worthless.

I realize I’m going to faint only a fractional second before it happens. I resist against the lightheaded, woozy feeling, like maybe I can scurry into my hiding hole before it happens, because I’m in a stranger’s room with the door closed even if it’s only a bleating lamb’s little home. Someone’s beaten sympathy into the lamb, and I don’t want to be unconscious and helpless when the wolf comes hunting. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm almost done with the next chapter, since I know this one's short. You'll find out who the navigator is soon, although I bet you can probably guess!


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And, um, this chapter is nearly as long as the rest put together. I hope you don't mind.

There’s a bunk above me, and that’s how I remember that I’m not in my own room. My prissy navigator would never tolerate something filthy like me in his bed. I always take the top bunk, the high ground, and I’ve had my task name longer than he’s even been a navigator, so I got to pick first when we transferred to the Sleipnir.  

I hear someone speaking in a whisper across the room, but I don’t turn my head. I don’t want to give away the fact I’m awake, not until I can work the knife hidden in my sleeve down into my hand. My jacket’s gone. Beneath the blanket I’m only wearing the regulation tank and pants. No boots, either. I feel cold all over without the reassuring heat of the hidden knives.

I don’t want to think about being helpless, limp like a doll, put into bed and undressed. I can hear something across the room. I scrunch my eyes shut. They can’t know I’m awake, not until I find a weapon.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.” It’s the little lamb, whispering, but he doesn’t sound so scared that I fear it’s the wolf come hunting. Small mercy, as I’d have a hard time faking sleep if someone started beating the navigator at no more than spitting distance.

“It’s fine.” I have to strain to hear the words. Refined, smooth, another navigator, then. Some cream-colored friend he’s called for help because a battered fighter just collapsed in his room like a sack of drowned cats.

“Should I call over to medical?

“No.” The voice belongs to a navigator, but it’s a fighter’s boots that tread across the floor, only slightly muted by the dorm flooring being different than the cold hard of the walkways in the lower base. The metal rungs of the bunk creak as weight shifts against them. He’s gripped the railing to the top bunk and leaned over me, a shadow behind my closed eyes. I feign sleep with desperation.

He speaks again, hushed finesse, and I know that voice at once with a shivering familiarity. “I’ll watch him. Go find his navigator.”

 _No!_ I sit up quickly, laying aside my ruse with reckless desperation. My eyes meet his. It’s the closest I’ll come to begging.

“You were listening.” He doesn’t sound surprised. His head turns toward the navigator, but it’s the wrong side, the patched over shadow. Like he’s forgotten about it. He quickly corrects himself, swinging his gaze over the other shoulder. “Ethos, wait.”

The lamb steps forward, attentive and eager. His round-eyed stare flicks to me for a moment before returning to the fighter’s back. The fighter’s not the wolf, not with the way the navigator’s looking, all half-hopefully and eager to please. I’m surprised to find I care. I’m glad it’s not his fighter who’s abused him.  

The fighter says, “Just go for a walk. He’s fine.”

“But—“ The navigator hesitates, bites his lip with docile indecision, and then hurries from the room. The door whisks shut after him.

I’ve spotted my boots tucked under the end of the bed and my jacket slung across the bunk ladder next to a slightly larger jacket, the fighter’s, and I must be in his bunk. The lamb sleeps up top, maybe because he’s afraid of the wolf, maybe because with one eye the fighter’s depth perception can’t be all that great, can’t make going up and down a ladder fun. I pull my eyes from the side-by-side slump of the uniform jackets. I don’t need the knives right then, but I want to know where they are all the same.

The metal creaks again as he leans forward, that lopsided gaze fixed on me. “What happened?” His brow tightens, pulling the scarred ruin beneath the patch in all the wrong ways. “Was it _him_?”

For a moment I think he means his little navigator with the big round eyes, and it’s enough to make me smile. Then I realize he means the junkyard dog and shake my head, slow at first, and then with rapid resistance.

He eases back against the rungs. “You don’t say much, do you?”

I shrug and look aside.

He pushes up from the bunk and strides across the small space to the bathroom. The sink runs for a minute, and then he returns carrying a glass of water. He presses it at me. “Here.”

I take the glass but do not drink. I gaze down at the wavering reflection in the water. It’s only a half-shadow over a dusky face, here and gone with the ripples in the glass.

When his hand falls against the side of my face I recoil. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, when I hadn’t heard him move, and leaned in close. I set my shoulders and stare, refusing to give anymore ground.

His fingers brush my bangs aside. “Who did this to you?”

I don’t have a task name to give him and even if I did I wouldn’t say anything.

He leans closer. I think he might try to kiss me again and turn my face away with resolute refusal. The gesture brushes my hair instead, dry and impersonal, almost chaste. His hand folds over mine around the glass of water. He is warmth against the sudden shivering chill.

“Deimos,” he says. “Deimos…”

Something in the way he says the name draws my attention. I search a long look over his face. It’s that navigator he wants, all softness and flash, velvet over steel, deceptively vulnerable but tough as nails. Our encounter in the simulation room was about how he didn’t want me – didn’t want me because he’d already had me, because I was being _brazen_ and not the innocent waif he thinks he wants. He doesn’t want a slut. He’s a lion, a grizzled, scarred king of the plains, lying down with the lambs. He likes seeing me beaten like this. He wants to know who smacked my face around so he can roar and bluster and protect. He’s just as broken inside as I suspected.

I smile. It can’t be a pretty smile, not with the swollen tenderness, not with the way it hurts, but it suits. I’m not happy to figure it out, but now I know what he wants from me. I immediately drop my eyes, demure, the smile vanishing into the just-parted, just-kissable, just-fuckable pert of my mouth. I glance up and sideways at him from the fall of my bangs. Shy. Broken.

Breath sucks into him with suddenness. His pupils dilate, and that’s when I know for sure this is what he’s into. First three times, that’d been an attempt at revenge, and it was no wonder his hands had been so pathetically weak against me. A goddamn new recruit could have thrown him off and gut him, I could have chopped his intestines into vivid pink borscht and not broken a sweat doing it, if I’d wanted.

“Tell me who did this,” he whispers. “If it was _him_ …”

The fighter he wants to break, the reason he came after me in the first place, because I’m always at the mad dog’s side during meetings and meals, just a grey shadow, just a little mouse. He wants me to give him just one more reason to hate, one more reason to break, so then I can be just like that scarred little navigator he’s so keen on protecting and possessing. There’s that darkness in him, that broken thing, and it’s blinded him worse than the missing eye. He only sees half of what’s there. He’s looking at my bruises and the blood and thinking that I let myself get turned over like something weak and shameful, like I wasn’t the one in control the whole time, like I just laid there and took it because I was too hurt and scared to fight back.

I’m shaking again. I don’t know why. I can’t seem to stop, so I clench my hands until my nails cut ridges into the curve of my palm.

Slowly I swing my head from side to side. I drop my shoulder, and it isn’t quite a shrug. His large hand still folds over my daintier one; I’m small, a mouse, and he’s a lion, broad across the shoulders and square through the jaw, muscled and tough like a fighter should me. I’m wiry and lean, short, spry, just as deadly as the bigger fighters but picked last for being scrawny. I pull my hand away and drink the water. I intend to make it some coy gesture to keep up our charade, but desperate thirst urges me to drain the glass. My throat still feels dry afterward.

“Deimos—“

I’m on him before he has a chance to say more than the name. I pull his fingers into my mouth and suck, needy, greedy, like his cock’s the only thing in all of space that can make the pain go away, and I’m just a beaten mouse who needs a lion to protect him. His fingers come away wet, pinkish with my blood-tinged saliva. My lip throbs in tandem with my chest, like there’s something behind my ribs that got kicked around and bruised with the rest of me.

His hands are gentle as they push me away. The pad of his thumb finds my lip, ghosting over but not touching the abused flesh. “No,” he says quietly. He can’t look me in the eye and say it, because he’s hard, jutting a tent in the crotch of the uniform, and I slip out from his loose grip easily enough.

My hands stroke over his waist and hips, teasing, pretending like I can’t see his cock just yearning for my hot, wet mouth just like I promised. I curl hand over his belt and work the buckle. He’s wide-eyed and staring, straining against the fabric of his pants, and then his hands are on me, firm but gentle, like I’m shattered glass, like he’s going to gather up all the pieces and put them together.

The belt slides free of all the loops and joins the empty cup on the floor, just one more thing to be forgotten as we paw at each other. Ache flares along my body, but it’s a delicious kind of hurt, because his hands are so gentle as they run over my scrawny body. He tugs the tank top from the waistband of my pants and up, over my head, making me release him long enough to lift my arms so the garment can glide free.

He sucks in a ragged breath, and I think it’s because I’ve plunged my hand down his underwear and into the warmth and musk of his coarse pubes, but then his gentle hands are all over me, pulling me away, stretching me to the bed. He’s holding me captive, still so gentle, my wrists just barely contained. I can pull free and cut him anytime I want.

His eye searches over my bare chest. Whorled, lurid bruises decorate my ribs and abs, a near perfect outline of a fighter’s boot. I arch to him, tucking my leg against his hip, telling him with my pliable and willing body not to worry about the hurt and to keep going, that I’m still weeping for it, for him. Slowly he releases me, and we roll over each other in a narrow bunk.

We’re side by side, legs tangled, his pants around his thighs, and he’s still got on his boots. His hands fumble over my belt, but I’ve got him in my hand, stroking, fondling, teasing, like maybe I don’t know what I’m doing, like maybe I’m not a whore on my knees, like I can be a stupid little navigator with big wet eyes. I’m not the man he wants, but I want him to fuck me all the same, so I’ll be more like what he wants. I’m broken, so the pieces are easy to rearrange.

His face sways toward mine but I turn away, burying my mouth in the pillow so he can’t kiss me. His lips fall instead into my jaw and neck. Air rushes over my skin as he breathes me in, nuzzles, caresses. I lift my hips and shift, letting him pull my pants down my thighs, over my knees, down to my ankles, where I nudge and kick to work them free.

He rises up, a shadow with a shadowed face, and runs his hand over the hard and skinny planes of my body. He’s almost as lily-white as a navigator, almost golden with a tan, like he’s seen sunlight and plenty of it. The gesture slows and then stops, his hand against my hip, his fingers finding the dark impressions of a fighter’s cruelty. I’d forgotten, which isn’t like me. I can’t be a wet-eyed navigator, innocent and stupid, with marks from another man’s hard fuck still fresh on my body.

He finds the edge of the blanket beneath us and pulls it free. He glides it over my body, hiding me, hiding the bruises, the motion slow and gentle just like the way he lies back down and gathers me in his arms. He’s strong, so strong, wrapped over me with our legs fit together and my back against his chest, his mouth against the back of my neck.

He’s limp against me now, the illusion ruined and taking with it his desire, but still he holds me in that same strange way. “I don’t know which is worse,” he says quietly. “If you let someone do this, or if you didn’t.”

I don’t understand what he means. I can’t understand him, because I’m writhing in silent misery from the agony behind my ribs, the throb of something kicked around and hurting.

We lay there for what seems forever, because he’s holding me captive, but his hands are weak with gentleness. I can cut him anytime I want, the knives aren’t so far away that I still can’t feel their heat. He begins to stroke my hair, and it’s like some half-forgotten lullaby even though he doesn’t say a word, it’s just the sound of his breath and a beating rhythm from where our bodies press together.

That’s all he’s doing, holding me, petting my hair, but I’m stiff and aching all the same. I flex my hips into the mattress, about ready to burst, needing to pull free of him and take care of things, but he’s got my little hands gathered in his big one, all curled against my chest with the way he’s curled over me.

His hand leaves my hair. It slides around my waist and then closes over the hard, throbbing need between my scrawny legs. My cock jumps into his hand, dripping and eager. I begin to twist so I can grab him as well, to follow through with my promises, excited for it. His arm tightens over me, forcing me still, keeping me against his chest.

“No,” he says. “Just – let me.” He strokes his hand up and down, infuriatingly gentle, when all I need is a few hard tugs to finish. I’ve been knocked around and teased until my balls are tight and pulsing, ready to go. I squirm against him, but he’s not so weak as I thought. He’s strong, so strong, with broad shoulders and big biceps that flex against my skinniness, and I’m fighting him with something like panic at the realization that I can’t get free.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he whispers. I could roll my eyes at him for saying something so cliché, but the way he says it doesn’t seem trite at all. There’s pain in his voice slashing through all that polished politeness and turning the sound raw, ragged. He’s still pumping a hand over my cock, slow and steady, so goddamn gentle I could bite his arm to get free and finish the job myself, except his touch is tracing fire, molten heat, obliterating my senses. I tense against him.

He fucked me three times but never saw me come. I did it myself, later, like the first time when I was still lying on the cold floor where he’d pinned me, or the second time amid the spare ship parts with my pants around my ankles and his semen still dribbling down my thighs. That third time, the last time, with all its strange slowness, I was in the shower afterward with the water beating against my back and my navigator banging on the door telling me to hurry the fuck up and I came so hard thinking about the press of my lean hips and gaunt ribs against the floor that I cried out, the sound lost down the drain along with my come.

Now it’s the same intensity, unrelenting, his hand sliding against my hard cock so fucking gentle I can’t stand it. His thumb glides over the weeping head and he whispers the task name they’ve given me right in my fucking ear and I’m gone, destroyed. It’s white stars and shaking, thrashing, helpless bucking, spilling over his hand and into the mattress with some soft, stupid noise from deep in my ruined throat that isn’t quite anything but everything all the same.

Afterward I’m still trembling, putty in his hands, as he holds me and kisses the back of my neck, and thank god it’s not my lips because I feel too weak to get away. He’s soothing at me, murmuring, telling me it’s all right, like he needs to apologize for jerking me off, like I wasn’t writhing beneath his hands begging for it the whole time.

My breathing slows and settles. He’s wrapped over me again, face buried into the crook where neck meets shoulder, breath pooling into my collarbone, bigger and stronger than me but seeming like nothing so much as a kitten rather than a lion. He even rubs at me like a kitten, all mewling and needy even though he’s silent about it. I’m back to being something he can protect and possess, apparently, because his semi-soft erection’s pressed against my thigh. 

This time when I turn to face him there’s no resistance. I bring my leg between his and push, rolling him on to his back. I slide down his chest with my hands and mouth exploring, kissing the ridges of his abs and feeling the way his muscles jump in response. I bury my face in his crotch and inhale the rich, warm musk.

“Don’t,” he says. “You don’t need to do that.” The hurt’s back in his voice, the sound of it all cut up and bleeding. His hands fall against my shoulders, tugging, playing at me, like it’s all part of the game, so I close my eyes and swallow him down. He tastes as good as he smells, like sunlight and heat, salt across the back of my tongue 

“Deimos.” He sounds choked, when I’m the one with dick shoved down my throat. “Stop.”

I knead my hands against his hips, telling him with the motion to just lie back and enjoy it, that the slow copper drip from the swollen break in my lip doesn’t hurt so much I can’t do this for him like I promised.  If he doesn’t want to fuck me, if he doesn’t want another man’s cast off leftovers, that’s fine, I’ll show him how good I can make it with my mouth. He made it good for me, all slow hands and gentleness, bringing me off with fireworks like that.

“Deimos!” He grips my arm just above the elbow and pulls me to him, draping me against his chest and into his shoulder. He holds me there with a trembling insistence. “I said no. It’s okay. You don’t have to do that.”

Well, no fucking shit I don’t have to, he doesn’t have a hand wrapped through my hair or a knife on my throat, and I’m not some goddamn new recruit or some sad sniveling bastard in an alley anymore. He was the one who just needed to lay back like some stupid fucking lion napping in the hot sun just like on those fucking nature vids they’d show us colony brats so we’d know just how fucking sweet of a life we were missing and make us want to sign up with first recruiter to come around so we can go flying off to save those goddamn lazy lions under a big bright sun. And I’m furious, enraged that he would ever think for a second that I would ever suck some fighter’s cock because I had to, not when I’m a mouse, a little grey mouse, with knives that trim the claws of the bigger beasts and slit their fucking throats if the warning doesn’t stick.

I push against him, rough, trying not to be desperate, exploding out of his arms in a rage. He lets me go, which is a good fucking thing because my knives are in my hands again as I scramble to snatch my jacket. I tear at the bed to find my underwear and pants.

“Deimos? What are you--?” He’s surprised, shocked, too stupid to realize.

I find the rest of my clothes and shuck them on with record speed, not bothering with the belt or even the laces to my boots. The knives sing to me a welcome reassurance as I shrug into the jacket and turn for the door. The room tilts sideways for a moment, and I stumble.

“Wait,” he says. He’s reaching for me, and I flatten myself to the wall with a silent snarl. It freezes him, hand just hovering awkwardly between us. His eye is wide and round, pulling at the ruin beneath the patch. “It’s okay. You don’t have to leave.”

I don’t have to, but I want to. I slap a hand out for the control panel and hear the reassuring whispered glide of door. He decides to risk it and closes big, strong, gentle hand over my wrist.

“You’re hurt. Let me walk you to your room at least.”

It’s just a small flick of my wrist to bring the knife down and ready. I swing it around but stop short of taking his other eye. I glare at him until he removes his hand and backs down, clearly unsettled, because he ought to be afraid of me, he ought to realize I’m not some fucking wet-eyed navigator. I’m a fighter, just like him, a dusty-skinned bastard, a little grey mouse, and I pull the knife away and then leave before he can see I’m shaking. 


	6. Chapter 6

He grabs my chin and turns it first one way and then the other, the broken nail of his thumb digging into the skin with delicious sharpness. The dark line of his brow draws together. Smoke drifts up from the half-forgotten cigarette hanging between his lips.

“Hope the other guy’s looking twice as fucked, myshonok,” he says at last. He releases my chin and flicks the cigarette from his mouth. When he gestures, the smoke trails wisps through the air. “Did you bite back?”

I consider the split leather glove and harsh red line across a fighter’s hand. It brings a smile to my face, and I nod.

“Good.” He draws in smoke and lets it out slow, right into my face, and it’s enough to make my eyes sting and my heart race faster. My eyes are stuck on his smirking expression, so smug, so lean and rough, all bark with a vicious bite, dangerous, desirable. I’m aching for him, same as always.

“Heard we’ll be getting into ‘Teron space soon. ‘Bout fucking time. Getting sick of sitting on my ass all day.” He stares out at the vast stretch of stars as he says this, and it’s because I know him better than anyone, that I’ve known him for longer than anyone, that I can notice the faint line across his forehead and know that he’s worried, even though he’d sooner cut my throat than hear me say it.

But that’s all right, he knows I won’t say anything, he knows I’ll just lean against the railing and nod, docile like a navigator in his shadow, just a timid grey mouse for him to use and abuse as he wants.

We stand there side by side, shoulders not quite touching, my hand clenching the metal rail because otherwise I’ll want to cling to him and smell the richness of him, smoke and sweat, worn and familiar like boot leather. I want to push him so he’ll push me back, push me down, hold me down, snarl in my ear and bite me, fuck me like he’s never done and I’ve always wanted. Always wanted, ever since he pulled me from a clutter of broken crates, broken bones, broken silent sobs, called me _myshonok_ , demanded to know why I hadn’t fought back, and then put a knife in my hand to show me how.

“Tch.” He snubs out the cigarette. “Better get your beauty rest. Early morning PT again.”

I shrug.

“Suit yourself, kiddo.” He turns and saunters off, head high, prowling, so fucking full of pride it hurts just to look at him.

He’s going to his navigator, that wet-eyed, cream-colored, special little thing who’s stolen all his attention and affection. He doesn’t know that I’ve seen them ducking into storage rooms and coming back out all flustered and glowing, that stupid little navigator with a just-fucked stumble in his legs like a baby deer and a goofy sideways smile. I can smell his stench, clean like linen and lavender, rubbed into all the smoke and sweat, turning my mad dog into some soft stupid puppy who forgets about a loyal mouse.

I toss the hair from my face and stare out at the black of space. I put a hand over one eye to make a dark, lopsided view, but everything still looks the same. Nothing changes.

 


	7. Chapter 7

“Oh, hello!” It’s the round-nosed little navigator, greeting me like we’re best fucking friends just because we’ve run into each other yet again in the confines of the Sleipnir. His big round eyes search over the faded bruises and scabbed over spot on my lip. For a moment I think he might say something stupid, like ask me how I’m doing, but he just hugs his tablet to his chest and smiles.

I scan the corridor behind him for the fighter with the eye patch. We’re alone.

“I wanted to ask you,” he says. Perfectly timid, hesitant, innocence tempered but not obliterated by whatever abuse that’s making him stare at my bruises with such painful sympathy. “Do you know Praxis well? I mean, are you friends?”

It wouldn’t be nice of me to laugh in his face. I shift my weight to one hip and shrug instead.

“Oh,” he says, crushed, wearing his goddamn heart on his sleeve. “Well, never mind then, I guess. It’s just – I thought you were, so.”

So what? I look at all the timid hope in his wide-eyed curiosity, the anxious tuck of his pretty pink lip beneath the white perfect little bite of his teeth, and I wonder what he wants. I shrug again, the gesture a bit less dismissive this time.

The warbling pucker of his brow flexes as he thinks. “Do you not talk?”

The rest of his question is, _to anyone, or just me?_ And I almost hate him for it, for his innocence, for being a stupid lamb amongst the wolves. I want to know what he’s doing here, why he’s still so cream-colored and round-eyed and sweet when all the rest of us are broken. All I do, however, is slowly hang my head from side to side.

“Oh,” he says. Awkward now, realizing what it’s going to be like to have a completely one-sided conversation, and he clutches the tablet to his chest all the harder. “Well, all right. It isn’t important, then. I’ll, um, see you around.” He smiles, tipping the statement into a question.

I fucking hate him for it, because he’s everything I’m not, he’s just like that wet-eyed navigator with the possessive scar that shows he’s won without even putting up a fight. I wonder why his fighter hasn’t turned the lopsided dark gaze on him with all the longing and dark fantasy that I see when his eyes drift across the monochrome divide of the mess hall, when he knows the junkyard dog isn’t watching because his back’s turned.

But it’s been a week since I last caught his eyes stray to the milk-pale sea of clean-scrubbed navigators, and just as fervently as that patched over stare finds me I manage to hide behind my hair or the mad dog at my side, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the lion’s laid down with the lamb at last, taking what’s so clearly ready for the plucking, because those big round eyes light up like the hot savannah sun. He smiles again, heart on his goddamn sleeve, before moving past me down the corridor.


	8. Chapter 8

There’s a navigator backed into a corner with a dark, lean fighter looming over him with a sneering sense of confidence. Even though a fighter’s boots are loud against the walkways, I’m just a little mouse who moves so quietly that neither of them notices. The dark threat has an arm up against the wall, seeming casual but menacing all the same, leaned over some cream-colored speck like a reverse shadow.

It’s only when I get closer that I see the little navigator’s big round eyes and big round nose, and it’s that stupid lamb staring up at the wolf with numb terror. The wolf’s got a wide, jeering mouth and a twice-broke nose because why the fuck not.

Well, it’s not my problem. I start to turn aside, ready to take some alternate route through the Sleipnir to my destination, but then the bleating terror in the lamb’s big dumb eyes finds me. His eyes widen further, gone to the moon again, and I wonder if he’s going to shout for help and make this my fucking problem after all.

He doesn’t. The stupid motherfucker just swivels a broken timidity up at the wolf like a fucking lamb for the slaughter, and it’s the most senseless, reckless, needless act of bravery. He’s got that sympathy in his eyes, thinking about my healed bruises, and it’s not my problem.

I keep walking toward them.

 “Please, Logos,” the navigator says. He nearly chokes on the word, and it’s because he doesn’t want to beg, he’s got some pride left in him after all. “My fighter’s going to be looking for me. We’re supposed to train together.”

“I’m your fighter,” growls the wolf. He leans closer and hushes cruelty so quietly that I can’t hear, not yet, but the pink drains from the navigator’s round cheeks.

“You were my fighter.” He’s trying to glare but can’t, not with all that fear clogging up his face, when he can’t bring his eyebrows down because they’re climbing an escape route up his forehead. “I’m with Praxis now.”

“Are you?” The wolf runs a hand through the soft tousled waves of the lamb’s fluffy hair and twists hard enough the round eyes scrunch together. “Has he made you his?”

He’s interrupted by the purposefully loud stride of a fighter’s boots against the cold, metal floor. This isn’t my fucking problem, but I walk toward them with my head held high and hips swaying with calculated precision.

The fighter glances at me, stops, stares, fury and lust alike twisting through the cruelty of his expression, mouth parting open as the wolf licks his lips in anticipation of a juicy meal. It’s not my goddamn problem, but I catch his stare, hold it, shape it into a wicked smile, slow my walk to a sauntering tease, and brush past them.

There’s a loud staccato lump lodged in my throat as I walk, eyes ahead, playing at being the prey, making myself a more attractive target than some sniveling little lamb without claws to fight back, like he wants, he wants a fight. I’ll fucking give him a fight, the black-furred, twisted-snot, ugly-mug bastard wolf that he is. A smile spread over my face as I hear him snarl at the lamb, a smack of leather on flesh, and then a fighter’s boots fall into pace behind me.

It’s not my fucking problem, but I hesitate at the corner and glance back at him, a coy, teasing slut, the mouse who scratched his hand, something he wants to hold down and violate to teach a lesson. I’m not some lamb to beg and shake and take the abuse. I’m a challenge, that’s what he wants, that’s what gets his cock throbbing. I slowly slide a knife into my palm. My heart beats faster. I keep walking.

I lead him at a slow enough pace that he won’t lose interest, that it’s a stalking hunt for him to enjoy. It doesn’t take long to find somewhere private, somewhere quiet, some empty bay in the vastness of the Sleipnir. Fighter access only, perfect, I set my hand against the panel.

I step into the room, ears twitching, seeing him from the corner of my eye, tense, alert, sweaty palm but rock steady. I know what to do. The door glides shut behind him. He moves forward, but I’m fast, I’m quicker.

The slash goes right across his face, diagonal through the mean furrow of his brow and the cruel twice-broke twist of his nose. Skin parts in a jagged, bloody line. I only spare his eyes because I can’t stand the thought of a lopsided dark gaze, but if I take them both that might be okay. I flip the knife around, blade down, ready to stab rather than cut, ready to finish him off, ready to show him what happens when a mouse fights back.

He howls with shock and fury. “You fucking cunt! I’ll kill you!” He’s got a hand against his face, blood pouring over his fingers, half blinding him on one side, dripping over his mouth.

The wolf’s not going to just lie down and let me gut him, so we circle around each other in the cramped confines of the room. I jump on to a narrow section of raised controls, the high ground, walking backward across it like a tightrope walker at some Earth-side circus they’d show us colony brats on the vids. I liked the nature programming better, the hard reality of kill or be killed, fuck or get fucked, all green grasses and blue waters and bright yellow sun rather than illusion and dreams.

“Stop running, you fucking coward.” He swipes for me, all brutal strength without finesse, some wild animal barely trained and shoved into a steel cage to go hurtling out into space to kill so all those stupid lazy lions can lay around and eat gazelles. I’m not a coward, I’m just not playing along. I know better than to get into his range. He’s bigger than me, stronger than me, and my flesh remembers even if the bruises have faded.

I don’t even see him grab it. I’m not even sure what it is, not even when slams into my face and knocks me from my perch. I go down hard, the knife flying across the room with a deafening, shrieking clatter of metal on metal. Something equally metallic, whatever he threw, and something big enough to dissolve my world into black and red flashes.

He’s on me, then, tackling me down to take advantage of the weak half-daze. His hands find my throat, throttling, airless panic flaring along long faded memory, but I’m not done in just yet. It’s just a simple flick to bring down the knife from my other sleeve, and even though it’s not my dominant hand, it’s easy enough to plunge the blade into the first connection my flailing can make. I get a lot of fabric and air, but there’s flesh and muscle as well.

My vision clears when we grapple over the knife. He hauls me into a flip and I let him, rolling easily with the momentum to get out of his range again. A ragged gash on his shoulder flows more blood, a victorious crimson streak, and he’s as awkward with that arm as I am with my entire body. Nothing quite sounds right, not the faint, constant vibration of the filtered oxygen or the snarling curses he spits at me, and I taste bitter copper when I swallow.

I rise into a half-crouch, almost swaying with the difficulty. This is nothing I can’t handle. I switch hands with the knife and grit my teeth at him, a mouse’s silent growl. He tries to close the distance between us, but two quick swipes keep him circling. Blood drools over the floor from his wounds and my hands, from the glint of the blade, dribbling into the corners of my vision with red-hot familiarity. I’m not sure if I’m bleeding or if I’m simply wearing a mask of it from his wounds.

He gets lucky with a kick, knocking me off balance just long enough for him to slip into range. He’s tall, long arms, all roped muscle and flexing. He punches me, wrestles my arm, twists hard enough my joint threatens to snap, my hand spasms. The knife drops. I stomp my boot into his ankle, throw an elbow into his gut, bring my knee up into his groin, but he catches my leg. Holds it, spins me, flings me down. I scrabble a hand for the knife in my boot, but he’s faster. The kick catches my chest and knocks me sprawling, breathless, diaphragm hitching and lungs sucking.

Now we’re rolling over the floor, no skill or strategy, just violence and ruthless blows. I square my palm into his throat but not hard enough to crush his vocal cords, and he retaliates viciously. The first punch knocks me loose, the second momentarily dazed. His hands close over me. I claw at him, scrabbling short, blunt nails against the shaking, straining, tightening vise on my throat. My boots slid against the floor as I struggle, it’s getting dark, I know this feeling, I can hear someone whimpering, choking, I have to stop him, I have—

One breath, another, all I want to do is breathe. Hands are on me, he’s taking advantage of my fear, and I let myself get distracted. I’m so disoriented it’s hard to tell what’s up and down, let alone fight back, but I have to fight. He’s snarling, a goddamn wolf, shaking me in his jaws, just a stupid mouse trying to take on the world, I fall against something unyielding that knocks stars into my skull.

“You stupid fucking slut.” He’s ragged, worn, snapping teeth. I hear the unclasp and slide of a belt. I try to find my hands, but my body flops rather than moves. I need to get up.  I don’t know what’s happening. My knees are shaking like—

He’s over me, dragging my arms up over my head. He loops the belt over my wrists and pulls tight, the leather biting into flesh. I’m splayed against the dark, broken control panel, face down, blood everywhere, in my mouth, choking me, I thrash weakly to get away, but he’s stronger than me, and I’m not even a mouse with claws to scratch and teeth to bite but a boy, a stupid boy, weak and helpless, broken.

I have to fight back. I have to. He kicks my legs apart. He’s holding me down, pinning me, brutal and ruthless, snarling in my ear, calling me a slut, his slut, telling me what he’s going to do now that I can’t stop him. Panic tightens my chest so I can barely breathe, I’m gasping, shuddering, drowning. Desperate.

“Gonna fuck you raw,” he promises. His hands pull and rip, unrelenting, unstoppable, unwanted.

“Uhn!” I bite at the air, snipping away the cry. He’s against me, hips jerking, grabbing at me, brutalizing me, and I roll my shoulders at him with uncoordinated violence. “Ssstt!”

His fingers thread though my hair in a mockery of affection. He lifts my head and then slams it down, shattering agony into incandescent glory. It melts into my bones and snaps along my nerves so that I twitch and go limp, senseless, absent of thought but still horribly aware of him. Of pressure and pushing, fleeting resistance, scalding pain, a slapping rhythm, grunted breath, snarling insults and curses, whimpering, something broken, nightmarish.

I can’t stop it.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t think.

I can’t 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my husband, of all people, for accidentally providing Logos with his name.


	9. Chapter 9

When I’m able to put thoughts together again everything fails to make sense, but I’m a part of it all the same. I’m lying on the floor with enough blood in my mouth I could gag, head throbbing, aching all over. It's impossible to isolate each individual pain, it’s all just one overwhelming hurt. It’s all I can do to breathe.

“Where’d he go, Ethos? I’ll fucking kill him.”

“He’s gone! I don’t – That way, I think.”

“Just stay here. Lock the door!” Footsteps, a fighter’s boots against the floor.

A sudden cry following him. “Wait! What about him? Is he dead? What should I—“

No answer.

Smaller footsteps, hushed little whispers against the floor, the fold and shift of clothing. There’s a tentative touch against my hair, cheek. Some wet sound, sympathetic and meek, before he tugs at the band constricting my wrists. The belt loops free and my arms fall from gravity alone, dead weight. He caresses my cheek again, the back of his fingers stroking softly, before the touch settles on my neck. Light at first, and then firm, searching. One beat, two, more, because I’m not dead, and he gasps with that realization.

“Oh! He’s—“ More noises, quick scurrying, the whisked glide of a door. “Praxis! Praxis! Come back! He’s alive--!”

Footsteps again, a fighter’s, loud and beating, distant and then closer. Out of breath panting. “What? He’s not—“

“No, he’s okay! I mean, he’s alive.”

Hands on me, feeling my neck, gripping my shoulders, rolling my body, lifting me, holding me. “Deimos? Deimos!” His hands are so gentle. He shakes me some, pleads at me, snaps at the little lamb to get back, give me room, but he’s the one crowding up on me, all over me, calling to me with such desperation.

There’s two of him when I open my eyes. Two of everything, sliding in and out of focus, but I can still see the tight, anxious line of his brow pulling at the ruin beneath the patch. He lets out a breath. His shoulders slump, hopeful, terrified, stunned. “Deimos?”

I feel his hands, so fucking gentle, and I can’t stop myself, I can’t think about it, I’m a creature of need and want, clinging at him with all my fumbling strength. I rub blood all over him, nuzzling at his neck, his shoulder, crawling into his lap or trying to at least but my arms and legs aren’t mine anymore, they’re disjointed and destroyed. I’ve broken, I want him to gather up the pieces, I need him to arrange them in a way doesn’t hurt anymore.

He pulls me to him, so fucking gentle, I’m shattered glass in his arms, he’s shivering with restraint, hands just barely on me, touching at my hair, cupping my face. “How bad are you hurt?” he demands. It’s fear that’s sharpening his voice, ruining that hushed up refinement, turning him into another tough fighter. “Deimos, how much of the blood is yours?”

Like I could tell him that, like I even know, like it even matters.

His trembling touch finds a blood-stiff spot of hair against the side of my head that radiates through my skull with enough pain I actually make a noise, a tightened whine from the back of my ruined throat, enough that he moans a despairing gasp to match. “I’m taking you to medical,” he says. “Your head—“

 _No!_ I clutch at him, dizzy, weak, hating myself, needing him, jumbled up like the pieces are all shaken, like I’m shaking. I can’t let myself be seen like this, I’d rather die, bleed out on the floor, head cracked like an egg, I don’t want anyone to see me like this. I don’t want them to know I couldn’t protect myself, that the little grey mouse needed a big blustering lion after all.

“It’s okay, Deimos. You’re – you’re hurt. I’m going to—“ He’s trying to get his arms around me, lift me, carry me like some limp doll, like some storybook princess, but I’m so fucking weak, my arms and legs aren’t mine, my body doesn’t behave the way I want. When I try to pull away I can’t, with all my sick, desperate strength I’m holding on to him.

He pauses for a moment, shock still, before taking in a breath and letting it out gradually. He finds the waistband of my pants and slides them up slow, not bothering with the belt, but fastening them closed with a big strong shaking hand.

“What should I do?” The navigator wrings his hands and hovers anxiously, round eyed and terrorized.

The fighter shakes his head, strokes at my face, and waves the navigator into silence. “We’ll take him to medical,” he says, like I’m not right there listening. Judging by the blurred together mash of my vision, I must not look all together there, so I’m not too angry about it, but I’m frantic inside to stop him. Medical will ask questions. They’ll want answers.

He hoists my weight like it’s nothing. The transition up from the floor unhinges my shaky hold on consciousness, but it’s just a brief lapse. He calls me back quick enough, repeating the task name they’ve given me until I flop a hand against his shoulder. I find his neck, the silk-fine texture of his dark hair, shaggy across the back like a lion’s mane, smelling like sunlight and heat, acrid from a glisten of sweat. I scratch my fingers through his hair and pull, weakly, bending him to me.

It’s a struggle but I manage. I lift my mouth toward his ear. It’s nothing, just a small little rasp from a fragile dry voice, barely anything at all. “Not medical,” I whisper.

He pulls his head back to stare at me, wide-eyed, and I try to return a level look as best I can. Maybe it’s because I asked, or maybe he sees something in my bleary expression, or maybe it’s the way I keep my hand in his hair, fingers coiled, pleading at him with the gesture. At last he nods and shifts the gentle force of his grip. “Ethos, go check the hall.”

The navigator hurries to the door. “I don’t see anyone.”

I nearly unhinge again when he starts walking. Enough hurts that I can’t really focus on any one particular part of my body, and it all feels so strange and distant for a moment. Shock, I guess, a small mercy considering.

“What happened?” he asks. Quietly, like maybe I won’t hear, or maybe the softness in his voice is just another form of gentleness.

“He saved me,” says the lamb. He quickens his step to match the lion’s brisk stride. “From Logos. He – I wasn’t careful. But, Deimos, he found us. He made Logos leave me alone. They went into that room, where I couldn’t follow. The access was restricted to fighters only, so, that’s when I came to find you.”

“Who is Logos?”

“Oh. He’s my fighter. He _was_ my fighter. Before you transferred.”

“I’ll kill him,” growls the lion.

He’s holding me in such a way that my head drapes against his shoulder, one arm across his back, not entirely helpless like some limp doll. Each steps pounds renewed agony into my skull. It’s a throbbing red and black kind of hurt, each jarring motion reflected and magnified into impossibility. I can’t stop the sounds from escaping, stupid, fractured small noises that aren’t quite anything except horrible.

“Praxis?”

“What?”

“Aren’t you taking him to medical? It’s down that hall, I think.”

“No.” He doesn’t sound happy about it. “But you go. Tell them you have a headache. A bad one, really sell it, Ethos. Get the strongest stuff you can and bring it back to the room.”

“Are you sure? Praxis, he doesn’t look so—“

“Go, Ethos.”

I hear soft pattering footsteps as the navigator scurries to obey. It’s just the quiet sound of his breathing, the plod of a fighter’s boots against the floor, and whatever small nonsense I can’t stop from escaping.

“Not much further,” he whispers to me.

I curl my hand against his hair. It’s a miracle we don’t run into anyone on the way, but it’s dinnertime and the monochrome mess hall must be full. That’s where I was going before running into the lamb getting hunted by the wolf, before making someone else’s problem mine, before losing a fight in a bad fucking way. I don’t have the strength to hate myself for that at the moment. Later, when I can think, when every small motion isn’t a cataclysm of disaster.

It’s not until we’re in the room I realize that its his, him and that round-nosed navigator. I don’t know where else I thought he’d take me. My room, for my navigator to find me, bleeding into the sheets and disturbing his sleep with my weakness. At least it’s not medical, full of questions, and I wonder where the wolf’s gone to lick his wounds. I shudder.

“You’re covered in blood,” he says. The door glides open.

I can smell the coppery tang, feel my clothes and hair stiff with it. My hands are red, it’s under my nails, dried into my hair, stuck so my lashes goop with it. Most of it isn’t mine, I think.

He carries me into the bathroom. It’s a cramped, tiled space, not really much of anything, with nowhere to put me other than the floor and leaned mostly upright, mostly slumped against the vanity. My head’s not even attached to my neck, it’s just a poured together lump of break and hurt, lolled to one side and unbearably heavy. Each shallow breath is impossible for the way my chest pulls against smaller aches. I went looking for a fight and lost, in a bad fucking way, but I can’t really focus on what that means at the moment.

“I’m going to get you cleaned up,” he says. I don’t like the soothing tone, like I’m too fragile to handle the fact he’s taking off my boots and unfastening my pants. Like maybe I can’t figure out he’s too soft-hearted and gentle to take advantage of me, like I’m anything to take advantage of, all scrawny muscle and battered body.

It takes some careful shuffling for him to slide the jacket off me and then work the tank top free of my arms and head. I’m starting to lose reality again, floating somewhere in space, limp like a stupid doll as he undresses me. There’s a pause in which his hands aren’t on me but I can hear the soft shuck and heavy clasp of more clothes being shed. I get the pieces to focus just as he starts to speak, but the words are such a jumble that I miss them entirely, they go right through, like trying to eat soup with a fork.

“Deimos?” Full of slow, careful patience, although he has to have repeated himself several times. "Deimos, can you stand?”

I could sooner dance, but I figure out he’s trying to get my arms around his neck to help. Somehow we manage, but in getting upright I lose myself again. I only know what’s happening because it’s such a small space, there isn’t much else in it, except tile and our naked bodies pressed together.

He’s got me against his chest, wrapped close with one strong arm, flexing bicep against my skinny back. My head’s curled to his shoulder, the side with the most ache not quite pressed but protected all the same as he turns on the shower. Warm water beats against my shoulders, back, not my head, he’s being so careful about that. It runs down my arms and drips from my fingers, and when I work away the shadows and blur from my vision, the water on the tile below is pink and then red.

He is so fucking gentle. He just holds me there under the spray for a small eternity. One big hand washes over my back, across my shoulders, down my arms. His fingers tangle around mine, putting my hands into the water, rubbing at the joints, digging the blood out from my thin nails with his broad ones. He washes my lower back, hips, upper thighs, and even between, going slow, letting me call him off, murmuring at me until I find some way to respond, to let him know it’s okay. I curl my hand against the back of his neck, and the blunt probe of his finger settles, presses, wanting to clean me inside and out.

It hurts, even though he’s gentle. My hand clenches, pulling his hair, probably not strong enough to damage since I’m so fucking weak in his arms, barely on my feet, leaned against him because he’s the only thing in all the world that can hold me up. It’s not even a noise, just something small and broken, deep from the ruin of my throat.

He stops, shushes at me, whispering comfort and apology, voice thick and choking. “There’s so much blood,” he says, and I don’t know what he means. I can see the tile turning red, vivid, brighter than possible.

He begins to cup water over my face. He turns toward the spray, and I close my eyes rather than watch the water hit them. Slowly he wets my hair, runs his fingers through it, feeling with tenderness for any other spots that make the world go dark and distant when he finds them. There’s just the one, still protected by his shoulder, the one he doesn’t dare touch again. I must be clean enough now, because he turns off the shower and pulls me across the tile. My feet stumble over the slick, wet surface, but he’s got me held, tight and close, so fucking gentle.

I’m just seeing flashes of things now, like the tail end of a dream when you’re starting to wake up but not letting go because it’s something good. There’s the tile, wet, no longer red because I’m clean. His chest, broad and golden, beads of water glistening over the muscle. A strangeness in the mirror, two bodies pressed together, something broken that I cringe from. The sink counter with the film of grimy soap and the two razors turned together and not touching, and an eye patch with dangling strings just sitting on the smooth ceramic.

I’m clawing at consciousness with desperation, because I want to see, I want to see what the ruin of his face looks like, he must only ever take it off to shower or sleep. There’s white light, the bathroom light, but it’s bigger and rounder like a moon, bigger and brighter, until it is everything and I am nothing.

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

_His breath is warm against my ear. We’re twisted to each other like puppies more from necessity than want; the bed is narrow, the bunk slats hard, and our bodies fit together like old, worn boots from so many nights spent like this. His arm is around my waist, pulling us even closer, and his chin nuzzles briefly at the crook of my shoulder._

_“I saw the other guy,” he whispers. “Good job, myshonok. He’ll have a hard time eating slop from now on with the gash you gave him.” His finger traces from the corner of my mouth out, where I hooked my knife and ripped the skin, splaying the other guy open like a fish._

_I nod against him, just the tiniest of motions, and swallow. It’s agony, and I tense with it. He pulls me to him, so fucking gentle, like he can feel the hurt through the places where our bodies touch. My throat’s so swollen and bruised that I’d almost rather drown in saliva rather than swallow, but the idea of being without air, of choking, lungs hitching and bursting on empty desperation – I can’t, there’s so much panic, even now, even when I’m safe, even in his arms in the narrow bunk in the late of night like always._

_All around us comes the soft noises of the barracks. The sound of recruits sleeping, shifting, tossing, turning, whispering, masturbating, fucking. Ours isn’t the only narrow bunk with two bodies in it. This late in training, the partnerships have settled, relationships and dominance been established. I don’t have to fear anyone trying to pull me from my bed, not anymore, not with him sleeping below. And on nights like this, when one of us is trembling with hurt and needing, we curl together until just before sunrise._

_He strokes a hand through my hair and then doesn’t quite touch my throat, but his fingers slip over my shoulder all the same. He presses where my collarbone disappears into my chest. “Does it still hurt?”_

_I nod again. It will always hurt. My chest is throbbing with ache from all the places where our bodies touch._

_The tips of his fingers draw a line along the ridge of my ear and then over the planes of my face. He feels at my cheeks and just under my eye, searching for tears. There aren’t any, not tonight, not ever again, not after they were all wrung out by the same hands whose dark imprint still lingers on my neck. It’ll be weeks before the bruises fade, but the damage and ruin lingers. I’m only just beginning to break._

_“You fought back,” he says. Like that solves everything, like it makes everything better. And it does, in a way, because I can hear the pride in his voice, he’s so full of pride it hurts. There’s enough pride in him that I can take some of it, let it bleed through the places where our bodies touch, fill me with warmth and take away the pain._

_I close my eyes. I want to concentrate on the feel of him, so perfectly gentle, and the smell of him, all smoke and sweat. I want this night to last forever._

_He begins to hum so quietly that it’s only because his mouth lies directly against my ear that I can hear. The melody breaks into words, hushed, hardly more than air, the lyrics a soothing lullaby in his mother's tongue. The harshness of the language becomes something beautiful in his rough voice, a dog’s low, rumbling growl._

_When the song drifts into silence I roll to face him. It’s the first I’ve moved since he hoisted himself up the ladder and fit his lean body against mine. Our limbs tangle and sort together within the confined slats of the bunk.  I can see the gleam of his dark eyes in the shadows._

_My heart races, so that surely he must hear the thud, thud, thud, the beat of it against my ribs. He is dangerous, callous, so fucking full of pride, stubborn to the point of amusement, sometimes cruel, and unexpectedly gentle. He is everything, my everything, the center of my slow rotation, a black hole that I’m gravitating toward with each and every heartbeat._

_I take his face in my hands, the smallness of them vanishing into the tousled dark of his hair, fingers threading, trembling. I bring him to me. I press myself to him. He tastes like smoke, like salt, delicious, daring. I can’t get enough of him. Chest to chest, surely he can feel my heart race, noses brushing, it’s clumsy, it’s wonderful._

_It is my first kiss._

_He’s shock still. I’m stupid enough to think it means something other than the truth. I paw at him, comb at his hair, rock my hips to his, work my mouth with all the ache in my heart. It’s my first kiss, my only kiss, I’ve been saving it, forever, for him._

_At last he reacts. It’s to push me away, soft at first, and then hard. His hands fall against my shoulders, shoving me to the slats. His voice is a flat hiss, mean, all snarl and bite. “What—?“_

_I rush sound up from the terrorized weight in my chest, through the devastation in my throat, whispering, rasping. It’s something ugly when I’m trying to tell him something beautiful. I’m repeating the words, over and over. My voice is raw, rough, grating, and the confession dissolves from three distinct words to fragmented sounds until they lose meaning entirely. I reach for him, wanting to kiss him again, wanting him so desperately with each and every breath._

_I’ve pushed too far, and he bites back. He shoves at me, kicks at me, hammers space between us with brutal desperation. “Shut the fuck up,” he growls._

_I can only repeat myself, whispering because I can’t be any louder. Every word is agony rushing up from the ruin of my throat. The sounds become smaller and then fade. I swallow, it’s torture, and his arms aren’t around me to soothe away the hurt._

_He’s leaving even though it’s hours yet until sunrise. I scramble away from the slats and toward him, hands clutching at the blanket because otherwise I’ll want to cling to him. I want to kiss him again. I want his arms around me, his breath in my ear, the warmth and ache where our bodies touch._

_“Please,” I rasp. “Sacha, please. I lo—“_

_He reaches out to slap the side of my head, boxing me across the ears with the blow. “Stop saying that shit!” Satisfied by my cringing whimper that I won’t repeat myself, he hooks his legs over the rungs and begins to descend. He pauses halfway down the ladder, just a bare shadow against the darkness. His eyes gleam. Wild. Feral. Mad. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”_

_And everything is wrong with me, because I’m broken._


	11. Chapter 11

I wake with a start. I can still feel his arms around me, still feel the warmth of him and hear the soft of his breath against my ear. The dream is slow to fade and I’m wildly clinging to it, trying to rewind the memory to an earlier night, trying to change the dream out of memory and into fantasy, but illusions cannot be. There’s a fragile, fractured feeling all through my body, and my face is streaked with salt. My head feels as if it’s been wrapped in cotton, muzzled, distant like the dark ceiling above. There’s a fuzzy, bitter taste across the back of tongue.

Slow awareness filters through the drugs. It’s all hazy and unclear, lacking focus like a cheap vid copy, but I remember being coaxed to swallow two round pills. I’m not at all certain where I am, because the ceiling is above me, but it’s far away for it to be the top bunk.

Abruptly I realize that there’s still a warm hand on me and the soft sound of breathing very close. The hand rests under the blanket and on my chest, splayed against my ribs. As best I can tell, I’m wearing a tank top and loose cotton shorts, but they don’t feel like they fit. I hold my breath, suddenly edgy about someone being so close while I’m sleeping.

It takes a small eternity to first remind my body how to move, and then to actually shift my head against the pillow. It’s him, the fighter, turned on his side toward me, the rugged line of his face just visible in the gloom. The bathroom light is dimmed to a shadowed glow to save the room from pitch darkness. He isn’t wearing his eye patch now. I can only see the barest hint of the scar since that side of his face is pressed into the pillow.

I hold my breath again as his fingers flex. His touch brushes across my collarbone and then presses at my throat. With the dream still fresh in my mind, I expect searing pain from the swollen, abused flesh, but there’s nothing like that, there’s only a small echoing twinge from where the wolf shook me in his jaws. What I’m braced for is only a memory trapped in a dream of a night long ago, but that doesn’t stop a flare of sudden panic.

I know better than to turn my head away, not with the way it feels like eggshells and shattered glass. I somehow get a hand up out of the blankets, weak as a kitten as I try to push his hand from my throat. “Uhn!”

It wakes him, I can see his lashes flutter open, but the touch against my neck becomes stronger, more insistent. One beat, two, more, it’s only my racing pulse that he’s feeling, but I need him to stop, the memory is too fresh.

“Deimos?” he whispers. Groggy, thick with sleep and sharp with concern.

I whine again, hating myself, feeling trapped within my own clumsy body. I am so confused and weak. I bat at his hand and try to be insistent about it.

He rises up on an elbow.  “It’s okay,” he hushes. “What’s wrong?”

I close my eyes and swallow. It’s impossible to explain, so I don’t bother. His hand is gone from my throat, that’s all that matters.

He leans closer and speaks even quieter. “Are you in pain?”

Hurt is easier to admit to than fear, considering. I find his arm and pluck at it, snipping my answer with the gesture rather than trying for a nod. I’m afraid if I try to nod than my head will simply disconnect and keep rolling, right off the bedding. I open my eyes, hesitant at first, and then eager. I’m drinking in the sight of his face without the eye patch.

He shifts upright and then carefully edges toward the foot of the bed. I wonder at the slow, cautious movement, and then as he leaves more of the situation becomes clear. I’m not in the top bunk or the bottom bunk. There are no bunks, just two mattresses set side by side on the floor. There’s a huddled pale lump at the far end up against the wall, the little navigator with his back to us, curled around his pillow in a tight ball. I’m on the other end, against the edge, leaving the awkward middle space for the fighter.

He’s across the room now. I track my eyes as far as I can that way. I hear a small rustle of medicine and then he returns, kneeling beside the mattress. “Here,” he whispers. “There’s still another dose of the painkiller Ethos brought back.”

I hate needing his help for the simple task, but it’s either let his gentle hand cup the back of my neck and lift me forward, or drown helplessly from a mere swallow of water. He lowers me back to the pillow with exquisite care. My gaze shifts again to the strange sleeping arrangement.

“Oh,” he says. He’s noticed my drifting curiosity and sounds a bit self-conscious as he explains. “Ethos’ idea. More room this way, and I – you were so still, I didn’t want to leave you…”

Like I’d up and die in my sleep from just a stupid blow to the head. No fight to it, just one breath, one beat, no breath, no beat. There’s something infuriating about him sleeping with one hand on me like some goddamn heart monitor. Maybe I ought to crawl to medical anyway. The unemotional cold beep of a machine wouldn’t make me feel like this, all hot and cold, shaken inside.

He hesitates a moment before getting up to take the glass of water away. I’m finding it hard to put much together in the way of thought. I feel at the unfamiliar clothing. The tank top isn’t quite right, it isn’t cut the same, it doesn’t fit. I shift just enough to see the brightness of it. White, cream-colored, part of a navigator’s uniform.

I’m glad the medicine’s kicking in. I can feel it melting along my nerves, softening everything, sapping the focus from the room. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t belong in some stupid little navigator’s borrowed clothes, wedged across a makeshift bed, being watched over and cared for. It isn’t right. I don’t need this, I don’t want this, I never asked for this.

His hand rests over my chest, big and warm, finding the spot where rhythm beats against my ribs, where the inflate and deflate of my lungs is evident. I must have been drifting when he settled once again into the awkward gap between the mattresses. I reach for his hand to shove it away, but it has to be the drowsiness of the painkiller that ruins the gesture. I’ve gone too far to stop our fingers from entwining together, or to stop myself from clutching his hand until I’m asleep.

 

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Nothing_but_the_Rain recorded [audio](https://soundcloud.com/kantgirl/replacement-chapter-eleven) of this chapter!


	12. Chapter 12

In the morning I go to medical to get my scalp stitched and my skull x-rayed. The fighter takes me, more like half-carries me, since I’m drunk-stumbling and disoriented the whole way. With his hushed refinement, sounding like a trustworthy navigator, he tells them a story about some accident in the docking bay. It makes me sound clumsy, but it’s better than the truth. Medical swallows the pack of lies like a cat eating cream, and after making sure I didn’t leak my brain out like a cracked egg, they sew me up and doses me full of painkillers.

It’s stronger stuff than what the round-eyed navigator conned out of them, strong enough that I spend the rest of the day drooling into a starched white pillow behind a flimsy privacy screen. They’ve sent away the fighter with the eye patch, or maybe he didn’t feel like sticking around now that I’ve gotten pieced together. I spend the time alone with my swirling thoughts. I can’t really follow my drifting; it’s just a jumble of hate and ache when I think about all that happened last night, about how I spent my morning, waking up with our hands clasped tight and warm over my chest, with the fighter and his navigator fussing over me, too sick and confused to fight their concern away.

That’s how I am, half aware, dazed, almost delirious, helplessly weak, when the wolf comes in to get his wounds treated. I can hear his voice, all cruel snarl and snapped edges, and it drips into the haze with ice cold familiarity. Fear curls in my stomach like a snake, and the rattle of its tail sends tremors out into my arms and legs.

He tells some lie not half so pretty as the lion, because he’s a wolf, mean and vicious, ready to snatch me into his jaws and rip my throat open if I let him. And I won’t, I won’t let him, I won’t let him get fucking near me. I’ve found my boots on the floor beneath the bed, and I work the stiletto knife free of the looped pocket. The curtain concealing my bed from the rest of the medical bay doesn’t seem near big enough.

I listen, ears twitching, straining, grasping desperately with my wandering focus. He tells them about a jagged metal ship part and medical doesn’t care all that much because he’s conscious, alert, snarling, strong. If he sees me, if he so much as fucking smells me, I’m dead. I can’t hope to fight him, not with my weighted limbs and head full of cotton. Best I can hope to do is slit my own throat before he has a chance to finish me.

Except I’m not ready to surrender, not yet, because I haven’t thought abut what it means to have picked a fight and lost, what the dull ache at the base of my spine really means. I’m a coward when it comes to staying alive, desperate with self-preservation. I listen and listen and force through the numb of the drugs to make sense of the sounds.

They lead him away for stitches. He’ll have a scar, thanks to me, but I can’t think about that now. I only think of escape. I sway upright and jam my feet into my boots. The knife, I need it, but they won’t let me walk out carrying it. I somehow manage to slip it back into my boot without slicing open my hand.

The clothes aren’t mine. They fit poorly. A navigator’s pants, but it isn’t so obvious when paired against a fighter’s jacket. The sleeves drape over my hands. It’s far too broad across the shoulders. I’m scrawny, skinny, small and worthless. Everything tilts sideways with a sickening lurch when I stand. Nothing hurts, at least, but it’s a nightmare unreality otherwise. I stumble against the curtain and bat desperately for the gap in the flimsy, paper-like fabric.

I focus entirely on putting one foot in front of the other in a straight line. I can tell that I’m weaving slightly, but I slow even further as I head for the door. Someone talks at me with a chattering flurry of concern. I nod despite the threat of losing my head entirely. Yes, I’m feeling much better. Yes, I’ll go straight to my dorm. No, there’s no need to call for my navigator. Yes, thank you, for telling the lead fighter I am excused from duty today. Yes, I’ll be more careful in the future. Thank you for the medicine. My hand finds the pocket of the borrowed pants and deposits the folded packet I’m given.

I have to leave before the wolf finds me. That’s all I can think of, and it drives me into the bowels of the Sleipnir with delirious determination. I pass a few grey-suited maintenance workers, who whisper comments about my drunken stumble. I’m weaving now, since just walking is difficult enough without worrying about keeping to a straight line. Deeper and further until I’m almost lost, because maybe if I don’t know where I am he won’t be able to find me.

Up, now. I’m climbing metal rungs in a cold sweat. My hands can barely hold my weight. It’s a miracle I don’t fall. Deeper, further, higher, I really don’t know where I’m going. I forget why I feel such a desperate need to get away. I forget why nothing and everything hurts. I forget who I am. Just a mouse, I guess, running away from something. I collapse against the diamond pattern of a cold walkway. Metal presses against my cheek. I’m throbbing, head to toe, exhausted, drained, tense all over and muscles twitching from exertion.

I need to get back up and keep going.

I don’t know why, but it’s important. I roll on to my back and watch the mystery of grey and black above swirl. When I catch my breath, that’s when I’ll get to my feet.

That’s all there is for quite some time, just the harsh pant of my breathing and the swirling grey and black above. Eventually my lungs settle into a slower rhythm and everything becomes soft again, a drooling kind of calm, the really strong painkillers soothing away the terror. I could get spoiled feeling like this. I remember the wolf now, and my fear, but there’s everything below me and nothing above me but the grey and black swirl. I’ve got the high ground now. I’ll be safe here, I know it.

I have to dry-swallow the next dose of medicine. I’m not sure how much time has passed, just that it hurts again, and I decide two of the flat blue bars is an appropriate amount. I must have been right about the dosage. Absolutely nothing hurts. It’s almost peaceful. I have to remind myself to breathe, to swallow, to hover somewhere on the cusp of consciousness.

The metal beneath me begins to tremble. The steady clang of boots against the ladder rungs penetrates through the haze and into awareness. I hope it’s not the wolf. That’s the extent of my concern, just a nebulous hope, because I don’t feel like crawling away and I certainly can’t run. I’ve found my hiding place, the high ground, but the sounds get closer as someone finds me.

“Oh!” says the little navigator. “You’re here.”

I have no idea what a little lamb is doing all alone like this. I should warn him that the wolf is back, stitched up and prowling.

The line of his brow tightens. “Are you all right?” He set the back of his fingers against my cheek for a moment before pulling his hand away, quick, timid, like I’ll bite him. “I’m sorry. It’s just – you’re very pale.”

He’s pale, sweet like cream and colored all the same. I flick my hand against the walkway as if to say, _so what?_

He keeps frowning, perhaps realizing once again the difficulty in my silence. Maybe he’ll give up, scurry away to a different hiding place. The wolf’s back, after all, and I should warn him. He’s had sympathy beaten into him, and it’s his pants that I’m wearing because mine were splattered with crimson ruin. A warning is the least I can give him.

He tips his head, trying to see the side of mine. “Praxis was looking for you,” he says. “Medical said you checked out before dinner, but you weren’t in your room…”

I roll on to my side and remember enough about how arms work to get one under me. The little navigator hurries to help, plucking at my jacket, pushing at my shoulders. With the combined effort I get upright and leaned back against the railing. It’s a narrow walkway, hardly big enough for the two of us to sit together.

“Here.” He rustles through his pocket. “You can have this.” He offers me a hunk of bread that’s only slightly misshapen from being smuggled out of the mess hall.

It’s soft and white just like the navigators. The bread on our side of the mess hall is often coarse and dark, cheap rye or barley. It’s what I’m used to, so I don’t mind, but the junkyard dog always growls like he’s expecting caviar and champagne with every meal. The bread sticks to the dry roof of my mouth and forms an unpleasant cement. Swallowing is more like controlled choking. Tears well in the corner of my eyes from the effort.

“Oh,” he says, with heavy disappointment. “I don’t have any water. I’m sorry.”

I shrug, since it really doesn’t matter. The bread settles heavily in my stomach. They fed me some kind of nutrient paste in medical, satiating and bland. For a moment I think the bread won’t stay down, but the queasiness settles out into a dull, sick feeling.

We sit there for a while in a silence that could be awkward but isn’t. He’s got his knees pulled up to his chest, which makes him look even smaller and younger. The bright tousle of his hair gleams like snow. I wonder if he’s seen snow, really seen it, and not just on the vids. I’ve heard that it’s dry until you touch it, when the heat of your hand turns it wet like magic. I’ve never seen it, just the vids, but I always wanted to know. It’s stupid. It’s about the stupidest thought possible, and it’s the medication that’s doing this to me, making me feebleminded, like it isn’t bad enough my body’s wrecked.

“Well,” he says. There’s a sigh in the word. It’s in that way people start difficult conversations, and I shake free of my wandering thoughts to meet his round-eyed stare. He looks away to study the interplay of his hands, the fingers clasped together in a tight tangle. “I wanted to thank you. For what you did yesterday, saving me like that. You didn’t have to. I didn’t want you to, either. You shouldn’t have. It’s not – it’s not right, what he did to you. I’m so sorry.”

It’s a pretty little speech, well rehearsed and delivered with only a few soft hitches along the way. His hands tighten. “I really didn’t want you to get involved. You should have just walked away. I… I could have handled him. We were partners, before I was reassigned to Praxis.”

I shrug, but he’s staring down at his hands and can’t see. He’s forgotten. I can see the tension tighten across his shoulders when I don’t respond. I reach out and tap his wrist, drawing his gaze up at me. I nod again, lower my shoulder into a shrug, try to smirk as if to say, _I knew what I was getting into._

Because the stupid mouse thought he could win a fight against a wolf, but I don’t want to think about that right now. I haven’t thought about it yet. I can’t think about what it means to have lost that fight, what happened to me because I lost.

“Was he the one who hurt you before? When we first met?” he asks softly. There’s not really a need to be so quiet, the hum of the ship is all around us. The question nearly gets lost in the mechanical whirl. I hear it more by the shape of his mouth, the downward slope of his brow, the tight empathy in his big round eyes.

I nod, slowly.

He slumps his chin against his knees. “I’m so sorry, Deimos.”

I shrug and pat his wrist again, absolving him of responsibility.

“Oh.” He shifts to reach his back pocket. “I found these, when I went to clean up. Praxis said, I mean, if you’re not going to report what happened… Well. I thought they might be yours.” He holds out my knives, the ones I lost during the fight.

It wasn’t like I’d forgotten about them, but it’s a shock all the same. I hate the slight tremble in my hand as I take them from him. There isn’t a special slip of fabric sewn into the sleeves of the borrowed jacket, the one that is too broad across the shoulders, but I find a way to tuck them out of sight and within reach all the same.

The return of my knives is more than enough repayment for making the lamb’s wolf my own. I lean toward him, close enough that I can see the confusion and sudden unease cross his face. He’s wary but not afraid, because I’m just a stupid little mouse with a broken head.

I have to put a hand on his arm for balance in order to get close enough, because the drone of the ship is loud, and I can’t match it. “Thank you.” I scrape the words out in a rasp that’s all the drier for the bitter side effect of the medicine.

He pulls back at the same time I lean away, so the result is a wide expanse of surprise between us. The round of his eyes shows white all around. “Oh!” he says. Then, softer, he repeats the exclamation. “Oh.” A sudden smile breaks over his face like the sun coming out behind the clouds.

I look aside and shrug. I hadn’t meant to turn him stupid with it. I just wanted to let him know we were even, that he could go back to not caring about me, so I can just be the grey little mouse that no one cares about, that no one notices. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.

We sit separately in our thoughts. I’m starting to feel drowsy now, the broke-bone exhaustion giving way to shivering tiredness. I don’t realize I’ve slumped sideways against the navigator until he moves. He shrugs his shoulder under my arm to hold me up. “I can take you back to your room,” he offers. “You must be tired.”

I wonder if my navigator has even noticed I’m missing, or if he’s already dumped my clothes into the hall to make room for his, like I’m the victim of some nasty break up. 

“Ready?” he asks, like I’m going to be useful in getting upright. He stands and drags me up with him. We both stumble like drunks thanks to my lack of coordination. My hip knocks the railing and the whole walkway lurches. I cling to first solid thing I can find, which is the little navigator, because otherwise I fear I might tumble right over the edge.

When the ground stops swaying beneath us, he says, “Okay” even though it really isn’t. “Okay. Um, here, sit back down.” He lowers me carefully, so it’s less of an uncontrolled collapse and more of a slow decline. My knees are shaking, everything’s spinning, I feel like I might throw up all that soft, delicate bread right over the navigator’s soft, delicate boots.

He stares down at me for a long moment, looks over the railing, and then swallows. “Deimos, I can’t carry you.” He sounds devastated about it.

I put my head between my knees, trying to control the unsteadiness. I got up here somehow, I might as well get myself down. There’s no point in being stupid about it. The walkway’s not so narrow that I couldn’t find a good spot to curl up and sleep. I’m not sure I can get down the ladder now without falling. Eventually I have to stop hiding, but I don’t want to think about that because then I’ll have to think about what’ll happen when I’m caught.

I flap a hand at him, telling him to go and not to worry about me.

“I’ll find Praxis,” he says.

That isn’t what I meant at all. I reach up and catch his hand before he can turn away. I tug, needing him to come closer so I can explain. He pulls the other way, freeing his hand. It isn’t like I’m strong enough to stop him. “I’m not just leaving you here,” he says.

He turns away again before I can stop him, but now I remember the wolf and become desperate. I lunge forward, catching him around the waist with both arms. I wrap myself to him, both holding him back and holding myself up. I don’t think the walkway is lurching again despite the terrible sense of vertigo, it’s just me, and he’s steady enough that I don’t think I’ll fall.

“Deimos, what--?”

“Lhhhg--” I try to speak loud enough so he can hear me over the growling ambiance of the ship. We must be near the engines for the noise to be this prevalent.  The effort hurts, ripping over old wounds and reluctance. I hate the way it sounds, ragged and raw, something ugly, and I’m saying something even uglier. The next attempt isn’t anything more than a dry cough.

He pries me from him enough to kneel. “What? Deimos, I can’t -- Don’t hurt yourself. Here, just, whisper it to me.”

We put our heads together, arms around each other’s necks so I can’t fall, my mouth right up against his ear so he can hear me. I swallow, but there isn’t any moisture. I have to swallow again before the sandpaper in my throat wets enough to form words. “I heard him, in medical. Your old fighter.” _The wolf_ , I think, but I don’t say that. He won’t understand and I can’t explain.

His arms tighten. “Is that why you…? Oh. Oh, _no_.”

I don’t like the sound of all that sympathy, because of what it means, because someone’s beaten it into him, and I tried to stop it but couldn’t.  

“It’s okay. Deimos, it’s okay. If I run into him, I know what to do. You can’t sleep up here. I’ll go find Praxis. He’s strong enough to carry you. I’ll be right back,” he says. “Just wait here, okay?”

He’s just a stupid little lamb, happily wandering off for the slaughter. I try to keep hold of him, because I don’t want his blood on my hands when they’ve only just gotten clean, but even a round-eyed navigator is stronger than me now. He stands and backs toward the ladder. He smiles, trying to be reassuring, and gestures at me like training a puppy not to bark at the door.

His descent down the ladder mimics the slow sink of my heart. I tried to warn him. It’s not going to be fault when the wolf finds him. He’s disappearing over the end of the walkway now, the tousled mop of his hair the last thing I see. It’s just as cream-colored as the rest of him, white like milk, like snow, and I wonder when it’ll melt.  

 


	13. Chapter 13

Three separate stares are on me during the next morning’s line up. I’m drugged to the point of delirium just to be standing upright, because I can’t hide any longer. The Colterons won’t wait just because I’ve got a headache. I aim my eyes at the lead fighter as he stalks back and forth barking orders and directives. It’s easier to handle the stares if I can’t see them, but I’m aware of them all the same.

I hadn’t expected the round-eyed navigator to return just as promised, with his fighter in tow, so the two of them could coddle me down from my perch. I was too tired to fight them on it, asleep on my feet. I remember only the quiet sound of a serious conversation, the lull of a close-held rhythm, and then a strange long night full of half-dreams where I’d wake confused by the closeness of the bunk above my head.

My navigator snipped and whined at me in the morning for stealing his bed. He’d come back to the room late, giggling tipsy from sharing contraband with his block-headed friend, the bulky navigator with the crested hair. I remember him crawling almost on top of me, the liquor-sweet puff of his breath against my face. He’d called me by the wrong task name, pressed his upturned snobby nose into my neck, rubbed an erection against my thigh, and then abruptly broke into soft swearing as he realized the truth. I pretended to be asleep. It made the morning easier, because it was one less thing for him to complain about.

The mad dog at my side is the first to stop staring. He huffs about it, too, muttering so the lead fighter can’t hear _. Where the fuck you been, myshonok?_ First words out of his mouth that morning at breakfast, and normally the touch of brusque concern would electrify my senses, but I’m too distracted by other thoughts.

I can feel the weight of the lopsided dark gaze. He’s in the row behind us, he knows better than to approach me when I’ve got the mad dog at my side once more. Every so often that stare skips away to find the wolf’s gleaming leer in the crowd of fighters.

It’s a fiendish mess that I’ve made of his face, even after medical’s stitched him closed. The jagged line runs from brow to check in a diagonal slash, over the twist of his nose. It shines wet and thick with the lubrication medical’s given him to help reduce the scarring. His dark eyes glint with pure malice, and I’m more grateful than ever for the mad dog beside me.

The briefing is almost over when the dog notices the attention. He turns his head somewhat, more puzzled than anything, and then flicks a quick look at the top of my head. I keep my focus forward. The wolf’s not so stupid to try anything in the open, not when he lied to medical. He wants revenge, I know that, I know he wants to finish the job he started. It has to be the reason he bothered to leave me alive. He knows he can beat me. And the fact he’s standing there glaring at me means the lion’s all bluster and empty growling.

The lead fighter orders us through physical training, which I manage only by resigning myself to the aching effort. I try to think of anything other than how sick I feel, how much I want to fall down and stay down. I turn it into a game, outrun the wolf, as we run laps. I think about how I can beat him at his own cruelty.

If the lion’s all bluster, would the mad dog be any better? I consider it the whole length of the fifth lap, the halfway point, and part of the sixth. Even if I admitted my weakness, I doubt it’d come to him taking up my fight. Not his problem, I know that, he put the knife in my hand to teach me how to fight, not to fight my battles. He’s never done that, not ever, and now won’t be the time when he starts.

I could make it his fight easy enough, I know how. That wet-eyed navigator of his, the one who’s so special, the one I have to keep an eye on, the one he’s scarred and fucked with blissful possession. I could make it his fight, if the wolf was prowling close to his turf. He’d like that, the wolf, he’d like a cream-colored navigator with a spitfire glare and big wet eyes.

I have no idea how to go about shifting the wolf’s target to new prey and, even if I did, I couldn’t be that cruel. It’s my fucking problem now, gotta deal with the consequences. Gotta figure out something, other than rolling over and taking it. I’d rather slit my own throat.

I make it to the tenth lap without a clear decision. I collapse over my knees, lungs burning, chest heaving, breath wheezing, world spinning, barely upright. Everything shivers with roiling nausea, acrid saliva floods my mouth, but I swallow the bile and manage to keep some dignity. The lead fighter comes over and sneers at me, offering me the easy way out. I shake my head and pull myself up straight.

“The fuck’s wrong with you?” hisses my dear junkyard dog. He jostles my shoulder with rough concern. “Go pass out somewhere if you need to.”

I shake free of his hand. I’d rather stay out in the open, where I can keep an eye on the threat. The lion might be all bluster and the dog not willing to stick his neck out for me, and the two of them would rather kill each other than get along, but stuck between their stares I can feel safe.

The rest of training doesn’t make much sense, but I get through it. I’m drugged enough not to feel the protest of my body. Afterward everyone heads into the showers, but I slip away unseen. We’ll be sent to our navigators next, to run simulations or work on the engine configurations, and I’d rather not deal with my navigator, not after last night, because even though I pretended to be asleep he’ll take it out of me all the same.  I plan instead to take another dose of the painkiller and sleep, locked away in my room, someplace I can—

“Sst!” I nearly scream when a hand closes over my wrist. It’s a verbal outburst all the same, snipped short and desperate.

It’s the fighter with the eye patch, and he releases me like having grabbed a hot iron. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

I’ve got a knife in my hand, palmed with deadly intent. I don’t want him to see how I’m shaking as I slide the blade back into my sleeve.  I meet his gaze and lift my chin, as if to say, _I wasn’t afraid._

It’s a fucking lie and we both know it. He puts a hand behind his head, an absurdly childish gesture, making him look like a chagrined little boy. “I tried calling your name, but I wasn’t sure you heard me.”

I absolutely hate that he snuck up on me, that he could, that I hadn’t heard either his boots or his voice. I want to believe he was being sneaky on purpose, coming after me with stealth, but there’s honesty and concern in his visible eye, the other side just a shadow. Abruptly I recall the scar beneath and the strange night before last when I woke with his hand on my chest.

He takes my arm, gently this time, moving slow so as to give me the chance to pull away. He guides me just around the corner where it’s more private. His fingers fall against my hair, brushing aside my bangs with tenderness. He’s gazing down at me with warmth. “Are you all right?” he asks.

And somehow his kindness angers me, because I’m tired of feeling helpless around him, sick of his gentle hands only wanting me when I’m broken. I know that’s what he wants, he wants something to protect and possess, he wants the rearranged pieces of me rather than the whole. I’m miserable with wisdom and wretched with understanding. I’m sick of feeling like this, sick of him making me be weak. I know I’m what he wants, and I hate myself for everything.

A glare twists over my face. I jerk my head to the side, away from his touch. I hunch my shoulders with rejection. “Tch!”

The vileness takes him aback. For a moment he’s silent, and then, “Deimos?” Hesitant, meek, like maybe he doesn’t recognize me.

Good. I don’t want to be the thing he knows, the stupid little thing he wants. The thing he scooped up from a bloody floor and held close under beating water and then all through the night, hand over my ribs like a goddamn heart monitor. I’ve got a lot of problems now, problems that weren’t mine to begin with, and to fix them I can’t be like what he wants. I need all my pieces to fit together.

“Where are you going?” he asks. “I’ll walk with you.”

So the lion can’t kill a wolf like he threatened, but he’ll play at being the hero all the same. I roll my eyes at him and snip my hand through the air. _Go away._

He doesn’t, he just stands there, looking at me with that lopsided gaze until I’m not sure what he wants anymore. I edge away, wondering if he’ll stop me, and then turn my back on him to start walking away. It’s not until I’m in the lift racing between the levels that I realize the fluttering twist behind my ribs is from disappointment.

 


	14. Chapter 14

It’s the little round-eyed navigator who finds me first.

Not that I’m hiding, really, just being careful. It’s an easy routine to stick to, up against the mad dog’s side during meals and meetings. It’s where I belong, where I’ve always belonged, where I fit easily and seamlessly. I’m being a coward about it, hiding behind the mad dog, because his sneering pride keeps the wolf and lion at bay alike. Neither will do more than stare so long as I keep to being a small grey mouse, meek and loyal. When the mad dog ditches me to fuck his navigator, I run sims with my own navigator, who bitches about it at first and then settles into surprise when we start to improve as a team.

Anything to keep from being alone, because the wolf’s snarling presence haunts me still. I wake drenched in cold sweat, shaking, staring up at the close and dark ceiling. Remembered ache flares along by throat, down my spine, into the most intimate areas of my body. I can feel the filth of his stare on me during meals and meetings, the jagged line across his face a tangible reminder of the hate he bears for me, the promise of how he’ll take revenge. I feel helpless, trapped, knowing that if I try to fight him again I’ll die. I’d rather slit my own throat than let his jaws shake me senseless again, than let him torture me slow with dread.

I don’t know what else to do, until the navigator finds me.

I’m not hiding, not really, but my weasel-faced navigator has gone sneaking shots of contraband with his friend, and the mad dog is rutting against his navigator in his dorm, and I’m hurrying back to my own before anyone can find me alone. So I’m lucky it’s just the cream-colored lamb, all fluff and sweetness, who greets me as the lift doors glide open.

“Hi, Deimos,” he says. And smiles. And it’s the type of smile I mistrust at once, because he wants something from me. He’s got both hands behind his back and he’s flicking an anxious gaze up and down the hallway, like a boy playing truant.

I’m wary, but not afraid, because he’s just a silly navigator, milk-pale and nervous. I cast my eyes down the remaining length of the hallway, looking for the fighter with the eye patch. The team I’d shared the lift with moves down the hall toward their room. We’re alone, almost.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” he asks. Perfectly polite, like fancy ladies’ afternoon tea, and I wonder if that’s how he spent his soft little childhood, tucked beneath lady’s skirts in gilt-edged parlors like on the vids.

I shrug. _Go for it._

“Oh.” His round-eyed stare searches the hall. He’s anxious but slow about it, unhurried, not so scared that I fear it’s the wolf come hunting or anything desperate like that. “Um, alone, I mean. Can we – I mean, would you like to come into my room? Praxis isn’t there.”

He adds that last bit like an afterthought, so casual it hurts, and I wonder what he knows, what he’s been told. He saw plain enough the stupid, bloody thing that his fighter picked up from the floor and held all through the night, but I don’t want to think of that as having happened to me. It was someone else knocked weak and senseless, beaten down, destroyed. I’m not like that.

I shrug again and step back into the lift. He follows me and pushes the button for his level.  He’s still got his hands behind his back, so I sneak a glance to see what he’s holding. Nothing but nerves, and right after I check his hands come forward, wrap around his chest, hugging himself for a brief moment before trying to look casual about it, like he was only adjusting his jacket.

The lift doors open. “My room’s just here,” he says. Like I’ve forgotten, like he’s forgotten, because he’s so fidgety and anxious that we walk right past the door and have to double back.

The bunks are set against the wall once more, regulation, like that strange night with the mattresses pushed together never happened. The navigator bounces on his toes for a moment before darting forward, trying to play at hosting with there’s fuck nothing in the room to accommodate. “Um, here, you can sit here,” he says. He gestures to the lower bunk. The fighter’s bunk. I wonder if the sheets smell like him, sunshine and heat with a hint of salt. 

I sit, and he sits beside me. A bit close, our knees touch when he turns toward me, but I’m only wary and not afraid because he’s just a little navigator, cream-colored and sweet.

“Deimos,” he says. And then stops. Bites him lip. Now I am almost afraid, because my mind’s racing trying to think what words could possibly jamming his throat like this. “About my old fighter,” he says. “Logos.”

I hate everything about the way my heart skips two beats with sudden dread, and my palms slick against the bedding as I try to act casual, like we’re talking about spring fucking flowers rather than a black-muzzled son of a bitch with a tangible scar to show how much he hates me. And then I stop feeling sorry for myself, pull my head out of my ass, and look at the navigator with sudden horror. I pull at the collar of his uniform jacket, searching for bite marks, and start to do the same with his sleeves, his hand clasped in mine.

“No,” he says. He fusses, frees himself, sets a modicum of space between us. “I haven’t – I’ve been careful.” He pauses, looks at me, mirrored horror and all that beaten sympathy. “Have you?”

I nod and then shake my head, slightly confused by how to respond. I show him instead, flicking my wrist to bring down the knife. I jab at the air, scowling, before slipping the weapon away. It’s a bluff, he probably knows it, but we’ve both still got some pride left.

He nods, relieved. “Yeah,” he says. “I know. But we shouldn’t have to be afrai—careful.” His cheeks darken, like I’d be so cruel as to scoff at his fear when I’m the one shaken awake by nightmares. I feel echoing heat in my own face, because it’s not anything either of us wants to admit.

Sudden anger clouds over his face, drawing down his brow and tightening his mouth at the sides. “It’s not right,” he says. “And no one’s going to do anything about it, not unless one of us gets hurt again, really hurt, or killed. His new navigator, I don’t really know him all that well, but he’s okay, I guess. That’s how Logos was with me, at first. I – I didn’t mind so much.” He’s scarlet now, choking on the shameful confession.

I pat his knee, encouraging him to keep going. The difficult words are still lodged in his chest, weighing him down.

He takes a deep breath and then continues. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do. I thought it’d be over when I got Praxis, but it’s not going to end. Not until – unless.” He knots his hands together. The next bit flies out of him one seamless rush, not separate words but one whispered desperation. “Unless we kill him.”

And I think I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly. A mouse and a lamb, against a wolf? I stare at him.

“You want to, don’t you?” He clutches at my hand. “Praxis won’t, he’s too good, he isn’t like that. You tried, I know you tried, I can see what you did to his face, and he’s – he’s a bastard, but he never hurt me like he hurt you. He would have killed you, I think, if Praxis and I hadn’t – And, I thought Praxis meant it. When we thought you were dead, that he’d killed you, I thought for sure Praxis meant it. I…” He swallows, voice breaking with bitterness. “I called him back. I should have let him go.”

I shrug, heart pounding, wondering where this is all going, where he wants to take this, shrugging with resignation at the idea of cold-blooded murder, because he’s right, and it’s almost terrifying to see vicious certainty in the navigator’s round, sweet face.

He speaks slower now, the words less desperate now that he’s gotten out the worst of it. “I know he’s strong, but I think if we work together we can take him. I’ve got it all planned. I just, I need your help. I’ve never killed anyone before.”

He’s looking at me like it’s just understood that I have, and not in the detached way of war. It’s like he can see the blood on my hands. I look away and lift my shoulder. Maybe I have, maybe I haven’t, maybe all he needs to know is that I can put the knife in deep and lethal when the time comes and not think about it, not hesitant, not think about things like revenge and justice and morality. Not lay awake at night shivering in fear, feeling the hard crunch of blade against bone, the rush of hot blood over my hands, the white-shock terror on a man’s face as the light fades from his eyes.

He lets out a breath, like all the air in the ship passing through him at once. “It’s risky,” he warns. “I mean, we could get caught.”

And we could fuck it up and die, too. I glance at his face, the hard set of his eyes, the firm line of his mouth. He’s not so sweet now, not so innocent, sitting beside me on the bed calmly discussing slaughter. He’s more than a stupid meek lamb, a wolf himself wrapped in sheep’s clothes, steel underneath a fluff of wool. I can see he means it, that he wants it.

How long were they partners, and how deep does his sympathy go? How many nights has he spent wrapped around his pillow in the corner of his bed, like if he becomes as small as possible he won’t be seen, won’t be dragged down, won’t get taken in a wolf’s jaws and shaken.

I nod, slowly, and squeeze his hand. _I’ll help you._

A smile bursts over his face. He throws his arms around me and then just as quickly bounces to his feet. “I’ll tell you all about it, but, first.” He walks to the dresser and kneels to pull open the bottom drawer. Cream-colored clothing, his uniforms, and splotches of green and denim as he paws aside a few civilian get ups to get the bottom of the drawer. He pulls out a liquor bottle, warm amber liquid within sloshing behind a fancy label with curling gold and black lettering. The bottle’s real glass. Not just the cheap contraband my navigator sneaks, but something smuggled along in a way that makes it special.

He’s entirely too excited and smiling for someone plotting a murder, but there’s a hysteric edge to the giddiness as he grabs two glasses and returns to the bunk. “Here.” He hands me one glass. He pours a bolt for each of us and then sets the bottle on the floor.

We stare at each other for a moment, glasses raised, hearts pounding, eyes bright with shared mischief. We’re like two boys sneaking sips from a parent’s liquor cabinet, rather than two would-be murderers plotting violent revenge.

He doesn’t give a toast, just a sly smile. We clink the glasses together and drink. It’s warm and rich, soothing across my tongue and sliding down my throat, nothing at all like the burning poison I’m accustomed to. He coughs, laughs, scrunches up his face in a way that tells me he’s never drank anything less than perfect, less than this rich smoothness. The bottle’s only missing a tiny amount, but the label’s worn and faded, torn in places, something smuggled along and made special.

 


	15. Chapter 15

The bottle’s just about empty when the little navigator rolls over and then doesn’t move except for the soft up and down of his chest. He’s all the way against the wall and wrapped around his pillow. He was hugging it just before passing out, speaking at me in a slur about his happy life on Earth and why the fuck he ever joined the military just because his father and his father’s father and back into eons when the first humans picked up a sharpened rock and smashed some asshole’s head in and his ancestor was the one telling him how to do it. Military family, him an only child, the navigator’s soft voice drifting lazily over the details with him too drunk to keep them straight and me too drunk to interrupt.

_What about you, Deimos? Why’d you join?_

I’d only shrugged and refilled my glass with his fancy brandy.

 _Yeah_ , he said, sighing happily. Like my shrug was an actual answer. That was when he rolled over and passed out. Leaving me sitting on the top bunk, legs dangling off the side, too drunk to try my luck walking a straight line back to my room, the hour too late and the dark ship too full of shadows. Better to stay here, behind a locked door, although I had to be drunk to even be thinking like that, cowardly and stupid.

I put the bottle away for him. Nearly fell off the ladder and broke my neck doing it, but there was still some left and I didn’t want to be the one who finished it. I stuck it on top of his clothes rather than bury it down at the bottom. Shoved the drawer closed. Bounced off the dresser when I tried to stand. Staggered back over to the ladder.

Empty bottom bunk. Could just sleep there. Probably smells like him, sunshine and heat, salt across my tongue. I fumble back up to the top and sit there, watching the navigator’s chest go up and down.

His father died a hero, leaving him a nasty pile of expectations and guilt in the form of well-intended smothering aunts and a fluttery widow of a mother. I wonder what he thought about growing up, if he thought it’d ever be like this, curled around his pillow in the corner of his bed, silly drunk and slurring his secrets to a dusky colonial bastard.

_My name’s Aidan. Before it was Pathos. Now it’s Ethos. I liked being Aidan better, but Ethos is okay._

I wish I hadn’t put the bottle away now.  I lay down on the opposite side of the narrow bunk, almost off the edge, the navigator just a small, soft lump against my back.

I’m debating what to do, where to go, what to not think about, when the door glides open. The light from the outside corridor seems impossibly bright, making me squint against it. A broad-shouldered shadow steps inside with the creeping sort of sneaking reserved for getting around a cramped room without waking anyone.

I feel like a trespasser, like a thief in the night, like maybe I should’ve gotten the fuck out of there while I still had a chance. Now it was just asking for it to be awkward, me up in the top bunk, him puttering around in the dark with the soft thud of his boots to the floor and the loose whisk of his jacket to the dresser. The bathroom light click on just long enough for me to see the shadowed profile of his face, the side swathed in mystery, before he dims the light and presses the door closed behind him.

The sink runs, pauses, runs again before he emerges. Shirtless, barefoot, in just his uniform pants and then his hands are on his waist, unclasping. I can’t move, I can’t say anything. The light fades again, and I hear him cross the room. The sheets rustle on the bottom bunk. What the fuck am I suppose to do now? Lay up here until morning? Try to sneak out? Should have finished the bottle so I wouldn’t have to think, could just pass out next to the navigator with the empty bottle between us and let the fighter think what he wanted in the morning.

He can’t be asleep yet. Confirming this is the sudden soft pool of green light. His tablet.

I scrunch closer to the edge of the bed. Closer. Drape one hand off the side. Keep my balance somehow, head following, hair in my eyes, blood rushing with the upside-down swing of it as I peer over the end of the bunk at him.

He’s laying back, one hand behind his head, the other holding his tablet. Sheet not really anything across his bare chest, probably nothing more than thin cotton shorts beneath that. Eye patch still in place. Hot as fucking hell. I’m drunk enough to be horny, scared enough by the navigator’s crazy plan to rattle the pieces in the broken way the fighter likes, drunk enough that maybe I am a little broken, like he wants.

“Hey,” I call. Or, try. It’s easier, drunk, the brandy’s warmth in my throat, loosening all the reluctance and pain. I say it again in my scratchy little whisper. “Hey.”

“I didn’t know you were awake, Eth—“ He glances up, and the name bites into wide-eyed surprise.

I lean over further. “Hey.”

He sets the tablet aside and sits upright in the bed. “Deimos? What are you doing here?”

I shrug, or try to, but awkward is a bit of an understatement with the way I’m balanced across the edge. I start to fall, tipped too far forward, try to lean back the other way and fuck that up, too. I catch the end of the bunk with my hands and drop clumsily to the floor. It’s a controlled fall at best, but I don’t break anything, not even my tailbone when I end up sprawled on my ass.

His hands flail over me the whole time, trying to catch me like snatching falling water, and I think it’s rather funny. I don’t have a pretty laugh, it’s too breathless and bare, too much like choking, always something ugly that I try to keep hidden. I put a sudden hand over my mouth to smother the unpleasant sound.

“Shit, Deimos. Are you all right?”

I try to nod, but then he’s very close. Hands on my shoulders, against the side of my neck, soothing at me, he likes that I’ve fallen down in front of him, he likes thinking that I’ve hurt myself again, that he can protect me from silly drunk tumbling even though he won’t save me from the wolf. He smells faintly of engine oil and smoke, intoxicating, like hot asphalt, so I throw my arms around his neck and smash a clumsy kiss against his lips.

I’m bad at kissing. I’ve only done it once before, but I’m too drunk to remember that and what it means. Our teeth knock together, the angle’s awkward, I’m clutching at him because I want to feel his gentle hands pick me up from the floor. I can be broken for him, if that’s what he wants, to hell with hating myself afterward for it.

For a moment I think it’ll work, his mouth parting under mine, grip tightening on my arms, the invasion of his tongue and the eagerness of my own sliding against him, wet, hot, electrifying. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never been kissed like this before. Then he’s pushing me away, searching an intense look over my face, brow tight beneath the strap of the eye patch.

“You’ve been drinking,” he says.

I probably taste like warm, expensive brandy, rich like polished wood floors, white linen service, men in tuxedos smoking cigars in velvet-draped lounges. I smile at him and nod, trying to look shy about it, trying to remember what it was about me he liked.

It’s been since the time I don’t like to think about, the time that doesn’t count since it was just losing a fight, in a bad fucking way, it’s been long enough that the bruises have faded. He won’t have to think of me like a slut now, won’t have to be reminded of my filth when he strips me down and puts me into bed. Or the floor, I don’t mind the floor, he can hold me down and press my face into it, clumsy with gentleness. I can be on my knees for him, swallow him until his eyes roll back and everything tastes like salt.

“What are you doing here?” he asks again.

The answer’s a bit too complicated, because he’s not part of the plan. I smile and nod again, curling my fingers into his hair. I lean forward to kiss him, but he leans back.

“You’re drunk,” he says. Like I’ve punched him the face rather than offered him something nice, something willing.

Clearly I’m not broken enough. I shouldn’t have bothered to catch myself, should have just fallen to the floor in a limp little pile. Cracked my head again, whined about it, let him pick me up and hold me. I can’t stop a frustrated puff of air or the sudden contraction of my brows.

“Deimos.” Pleading at me, still sounding like I’ve started hammering at him with my fists.

I pull myself to my knees, so we’re eye level with him still mostly in the bed and me still mostly on the floor. I don’t know what to do, how to be more like what he wants. I could dye my hair, dip myself in chalk dust, learn to fly, save his life, get a scar, and be something he can’t have. I could get up off the goddamn floor with my shredded dignity and leave.

Instead I look him the eye and say, “Do you want to, or not?”

A lump bobs through his throat as he swallows. He wants to, I can see the way he’s looking at me, the dilation of his pupils and slight catch of his lip between his teeth. He opens his mouth and lies to me. Says, “Not tonight.”

Like I’ll give him another night, like I’ll be this happily drunk on warm brandy ever again, because there’s barely any left in the bottle, and you’d have to suck a lot of dick on the Sleipnir to find another liquor half so good. Like I’m too fucking slutty and stupid, some drunk whore, crawling all over him with grimy knees and a sore mouth. Like I’m his to reject.

I jerk to my feet, nearly crack my head on the lower bunk. Glare, and take a step back. I’m still speaking, the terrible rasp of my voice quieter than a whisper, dry like paper. “Fine. I’ll go find someone else.”

It’s a bluff, because I didn’t want to venture out alone anyway, and I’m sure as fuck not going to prowl the dark halls of the ship looking for a quickie. I’ll go to bed with aching, unfilled need, not unless my navigator’s drunk again, rubbing at me like a bitch in heat, the both of us drunk, and we can call each other by the wrong task names and forget about it in the morning, refusing to make eye contact, he can be ashamed he fucked some filthy slutty colonist trash like me.

“Wait,” he says. He abandons the bed. I was right, not much more than thin cotton and shadow between his legs. He catches my hand, turns me to him. White around his eye. Shoulders tense. He’s afraid. “Don’t do that. Don’t go to him.”

And I could punch him for it, could scream at him for it. I can’t even process the accusation it’s so repulsive. My lips part in a silent snarl. I shove at him, horrified by the idea, disgusted and maybe ashamed he’d ever think that of me, that I’d go looking for – for – I can’t even think of it, I won’t think about it, I haven’t thought about the fight I lost or what it meant to lose, what happened to me because I lost.

I’m beating at his chest with my fists, inarticulate even with my body language, throwing a hissy fit right there in the middle of the night because he’s making me feel worthless and weak again, scattering all my pieces, running his gentle hands over the broken cracks so it hurts even when he’s being nice. I told myself not think about it, and here he is throwing it in my face.

It’s because I’m drunk. It has to be because I’m drunk. A wet, sloppy drunk, getting emotional like this, losing control like this, broken little sounds escaping my throat as I beat at him. He catches my fists, pulls me to him. I fall against his chest. Begin to sob. Shoulders wracking, knees shaking, breath hitching, despairing desperation, all the while making those same stupid noises.

“Deimos, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Voice thick, choking, hands impossibly gentle as he gathers the pieces and holds me close, his large body folded over my smaller one. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean it. Please. I’m sorry.”

He’s lying, he’s a fucking liar, he did mean it. He thinks I wanted it, he wants to think I wanted it, or he can’t decide which is worse, if I wanted it or if I didn’t, if I let myself be a slut or if I am a slut. He doesn’t want a whore, he wants some virginal fantasy, a wet-eyed navigator to protect.

He picks me up like it’s nothing. Carries me the not even a step’s worth of distance to the bed. It’s a cramped little room, everything wedged together. He ducks his head, places me on the lower bunk, tangles in after me. Draws me to him again. So fucking gentle.

He kisses my cheeks, strokes my hair, rocks me to him. And he must fucking love it, the taste of my tears, salt and sorrow, proof that I’m broken just like he wants. The thought only makes me cry all the harder, and I fucking hate myself. I hate him for making me feel like this, for the treacherous part of me that’s secretly thrilled at the warmth of his arms, the tender way he kisses my tears. He’s shaking with restraint, so gentle it hurts, and I’m just a drunk, broken mess.

“I didn’t mean it,” he says again. He’s speaking into my hair, wrapped around me, big muscled thigh over my scrawny hip. “Please don’t cry.”

I nod against him. It’s not so simple as that, but I’m so fucking embarrassed now that shame is starting to overtake sorrow, so maybe I can stop being such a weak piece of shit. I haven’t cried since the night I lost my voice, years ago, when I was just a stupid recruit.

He kisses my forehead. Holds me to him. Brushes the gritty moisture from under my eyes and across my cheeks. The side of his thumb is rough, callused, harsh when I expect it to be smooth. I quiet against him, no longer in hysterics but feeling fragile all the same. I don’t want him to stop petting at me, rubbing circles of comfort across my shoulders and into the back of my neck.

I don’t want him to reject me again.

I nudge my chin into his jaw. Find his ear with my mouth. My quiet, rough rasp, wet from crying, soaked with liquor. “I didn’t want him to.” It seems like the important thing to say, and I’m drunk enough that it’s possible to say.

A sound comes from his throat, high and pitched like I’ve just kicked his balls in a dirty fight. His hands clutch over me, crushing me to his chest. He curls around me, swallowing my smaller frame with his large one. He’s shaking with restraint, impossibly gentle, shivering with tenderness as he enfolds me. “I know,” he says, thick and choking.

This time when I lean in for a kiss he lets me. He’s the one who tastes sweet, like sunlight in winter. We kiss slow because we can, because the moment feels right for it. I’m still learning how to do this, and I hope he doesn’t feel my hesitance, my ignorance. I catch his lip with my teeth, lightly nipping, and he shifts against me in response. He’s hard already, aching for it, but there’s no rush in the way he runs his hands across my back, the way he holds me, so gentle I could cry again, the way his lips work against mine.

He rolls me onto my back and into the pillow. He’s half over me, half stretched out beside me, still kissing with languorous, wonderful motions. His big hand rubs over my stomach and plucks at the hem of my tank top. His hand slips beneath the ribbed fabric, brushes the hard plane of my chest. Radiant pleasure follows the grace of his touch.

My jacket is somewhere on the top bunk, my boots tumbled over the navigator’s beneath the ladder where we tossed them. He’s still wearing nothing but a thin pair of cotton shorts, and I drag my hand along the line of him until I find them, rub underneath, across the strength of his thigh. I stretch further against the musk warmth of him, the throb of his erection.

He pulls back slightly. Something crushes at my chest, renders me into need, and I rise against the bed to follow him. I must have pushed too much, been too eager with my hands. I can do better. We can be slow again, if that’s what he wants. I lean for his lips again, and he retreats further. I can hardly breathe now against the tightness.

His fingers brush aside my bangs. He kisses me on the cheek, not my lips, and holds his face there, breath warm against my jaw, foreheads touching, hand against the side of my head. “Not tonight,” he says. Achingly gentle, almost pleading at me, and then actually begging. “Please, Deimos.”

I don’t understand, but he isn’t rejecting me, not fully. He’s still pressed against me, still got his gentle hands on me. He pulls me to him, arranging me against the broad comfort of his chest. His big hand strokes over my hair. When I lift my face toward his, we kiss, but that’s all we do. He’s stiff and aching, leaking into his shorts, it has to be uncomfortable. I don’t understand what he wants.  I’m drunk, starting to fall into lethargy, becoming frustrated and sad.

This time when I reach beneath the waistband of his shorts, he lets me. I keep slow, trying to be gentle, trying to mimic his careful touch. I push the shorts off his hips and out of the way. We kiss, I close my hand over his cock, and rub against him with my entire body. Slow, careful, I don’t want to rush at him, make him think this is anything more than me helping him sleep.

He sucks in his lower lip, biting it, and I nip a kiss at the neat row of his teeth against the pink flesh. A bit harder now, a little more insistent with my strokes. I slick my thumb over the slit, he arches to me like a puppet on a string. I curl my other hand in his hand, playing at the silk-soft strands. It’s so dark, his hair, I think it must be coarse, but it isn’t. It isn’t at all. He’s rough in all the places I expect him to be smooth, smooth in all the places I expect him to be rough. Faster now, pulling at him, quickening my rhythm to match the heave of his chest.

I close my mouth over his, we arch together, he’s spurting into my hand, moaning against my lips, it’s so fucking intense and I’m not even the one coming. I could, I’m wild for it, horny and frustratingly soft, half-cocked with such annoyance I’ve got to be drunk, limp dicked but wanting it all the same. His hips buck, he’s still locked into climax, and I tug him through the aftershocks. I hold his lip in teeth and pull, sucking, tongue darting out to flick against him.

He threads a hand through my hair and pulls me to him. Kisses me deep, thorough, tongue plunging, until I forget to breathe and become lightheaded, dizzy with lust, chest tight. He let me go, stares up at me with a fucked to the moon glaze.

I shrug free of my tank top and offer it to him. He mops the semen from his chest and then chucks the soiled shirt beneath the bunk to be dealt with in the morning. Gathers me to him, sighs, nudges at my neck with the hard bump of his nose. Somehow he seems smaller like this, curled into me rather than around me, and I’m the one straining to put my arms around his neck and hold him close, I’m the one with a drunk, staccato beat against my ribs.

I think we’ll fall asleep like this, chest to chest, a tangle of limbs and breath, but before the swaying darkness can clutch me down into slumber, he shifts. Pulls me right along with him, too, positioning my weight around like it’s nothing. Arranges us, the blankets, the pillow, settling everything into a tight, comfortable nest. He sets my back against his chest, one strong around my waist, the other curled between us, his legs and mine fit together like two spoons in a drawer, or something even closer, I don’t know, because I don’t understand. Our hands clasp, fingers laced together, and the hush his voice brushes the back of my neck, but I’m too drunk and sleepy to understand. 

 

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Tomoscloud made an adorable [fanart](http://tomoscloud.tumblr.com/post/46440251494/because-in-my-mind-hes-freaking-adorable-when) for this chapter!

Thank you <3


	16. Chapter 16

Everything’s different in the morning.

I wake in his arms without a clear understanding of why. For a moment I don’t even recognize him, I think I’m still a dumb recruit curled on the skinny top bunk with a skinny pup of a fighter, head pounding from the cheap vodka we shared at the bar, throat sore from howling at the night, stumbling drunk on our way back to the barracks, jerking each other off because it’s the military and might as well, passing out in a tangle of limbs, not talking about the stickiness between the sheets in the morning.

But I’m not a recruit, there’s a bunk above me rather than below, this is the Sleipnir, the pup’s grown into a growling junkyard brawler, and there’s a lion grumbling into my ear with a soft, hushed little snore.

I can’t move. I’m frozen, stomach full of rocks, head stuffed with bees, dry mouth choked with cotton, hung over in a way that could be worse, the hang over’s just as rich and warm as the brandy itself. Little water and coarse dark bread for breakfast, I’ll be fine, I don’t give a shit about the hang over. What’s got me so terrified is the close clasp of our hands, our bodies, the possessive and protective way he’s wrapped against me, the drunk sideways memory of –

A quiet, dying and desolate sort of noise stops my panicked thoughts. The bunk above creaks slightly as the little navigator shifts around. He moans again, sounding twice as miserable.

I have to hide. I have to leave. I can’t be here, I shouldn’t be here, fuck. Fuck, I kissed him. I kissed the fighter, threw myself at him. Oh, hell, my eyes sting, my cheeks have grit on them – I was sloppy drunk mess, sobbing, kissing, needing. I wish he would have fucked me instead, held me down with those gentle hands of his, buried his cock in my ass and given me something that wouldn’t hurt like this.

More creaking and shifting from above. The navigator’s feet appear against the rungs of the ladder. He more or less doesn’t fall entirely, but it’s far from graceful. I can’t tell if he sees me or if the fighter’s bulk can hide me against the wall. His milk-pale curls are a riotous tousle around his head, flatter on one side than the other. He’s got a hand against his head, face winced together, as he stumbles blearily toward the bathroom.

That’s what wakes the fighter. He stirs, arms tightening, some small sound of contentment following the gesture. His lips work sleepily at the back of my neck.

I push against him, too frantic to be nice about it, scrambling up in the bed. I have no idea where my clothes are, the rest of them, I’ve got my pants and socks and nothing else. Not my jacket or my boots with the knives, and I need their reassuring heat.

He stretches, lazy like some goddamn lion under the hot sun, and then sits up on his elbows. He slept in the eye patch, but it’s askew, almost useless. I hate the bedraggled look of him, the fucking intimacy of it, the sleepy little smile he gives me. And then he wakes a bit more, sits a bit straighter, alarmed and anxious.

“Deimos? Are you all right?”

I’ve gotten stuck somewhere against the wall, because he’s wedged me there in our sleep, put himself on the outside edge. I’m shivering with tension and hating myself for it, thoughts and memories crashing around my head with blistering agony. I can’t believe I kissed him, threw myself at him, got that drunk and didn’t black it out, got that drunk and didn’t fuck him, got rejected with all that fucked up gentle protective bullshit because I broke down sobbing, broke right down the middle and liked it, liked being what he wanted for just one goddamn drunk night.

From the bathroom comes the muted sound of the little navigator retching. The fighter half-turns toward the sound without taking his eye off me. “Is that Ethos?” he asks. Painfully neutral, like he can offer some distraction from whatever’s got me pinned up against the wall and staring at him in silent, shaking horror.

I don’t respond, not even a nod. 

He moves slow, reaching for my arm. “Deimos?”

I snap away from him so hard my hand bounces off the wall, knuckles rapping, pain biting at the abuse. I can’t get any further away, the wall’s there, I know better than to get myself trapped like this.

He’s got one eye wide now, and the patch is so crooked I can see the scarred flesh pull and shape with terrible failed mimicry. He swallows, moves even slower, gets all the way upright before I notice. He’s got me trapped. I can’t stop shaking, because I’m staring at his lips and remembering them.

I’ve only ever kissed Sacha. My first kiss, I saved it for him, I couldn’t save the rest of me, fucked around, violated, thrown down to the floor, pressed against ship hulls, hands in my hair, fucking me, gagging me, taking everything from me but that kiss, the one I saved for him. I was saving all the rest for him as well, my second kiss, my third kiss, my last kiss. It was the one thing I could save, the only thing precious and pure I had left to give him. The only thing about me still worth a damn.

“Deimos,” he says. Achingly slow and gentle. He doesn’t try to reach for me again. “Nothing happened. I wouldn’t – we didn’t. Nothing happened, okay?”

He’s an idiot, babbling at me with an idiot’s concern. Like I’m scared of fucking just because of the fight I lost. Like I think he’d take advantage of me, like I’m anything to him to take advantage of. I was his last night to reject, but he took from me all the same. Maybe it’s easier that way, to think he stole my kisses, to forget the shameless way I threw myself at him. How I forgot everything about myself, became something vile and weak, so fucking desperate to be anything he wanted.

And I want to kiss him again, even now. I woke up in his arms so fucking hard it hurt, aching for him, warm and safe and loving the feeling of him against me and our bodies so close, like two spoons in a drawer, like being a recruit all over again. And I fucking hate myself for it.

“I promise,” he says. “Nothing happened.”

Because kissing is nothing to him, and I wonder viciously who else he’s kissed. The sweet little lamb, the one puking expensive brandy into the toilet with wretched abandon? Some recruit of his own in training, or maybe even before that, in adolescent crushes and school boy trysts, unless he’s the type who only does it like this because it’s the military, because it doesn’t have to be anything more. Kissing is nothing to him.

“Deimos, I wouldn’t do that to you. Please believe me.”

And there it is, plain across his face, evident in the twist of his brow and the frantic lines at the corner of his mouth, the swollen depth of his one dark eye, the horrible mimicry of the empty scar. His guilt, tangible like a living thing between us, something cold and barren.

He’s feeling guilty, thinking about the three times he fucked me. Held a hand over my mouth, pinned me to the cold floor, jerked down my pants and fumbled at me, trying to be mean about it, trying to be harsh, but still so fucking gentle because he can’t be anything else. It would never occur to him to be rough, to take me tight and raw, to leave me bleeding and ripped open like a cheap alley whore. He had to be nice about, hasty with his pathetic attempt at revenge, blunt fingers and spit pressing at me with rushed urgency.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, spit in his face or throw my arms around him, reach for the knives to rip his guts or slash my own throat. I don’t know what to do or think or feel, not anymore, not seeing the anguished twist of his face as he tells me it’s nothing, we’re nothing, that nothing happened last night just because he was a perfect little saint too good to put his dick in my broken ass or slutty mouth.

He reaches for me again. He wants to hug me, or kiss me, hold me like he did last night and all through the night, like two spoons in a drawer.

I don’t have anywhere to go. I hunch my shoulders, jerk my arms up in front of my face, back flat to the wall like I could disappear right though it. “Sst!”

“Deimos.” Like I’ve got the knife in him already, twisting, him bleeding all the hurt in the world into the way he says it. “Deimos, please, I’m not going to hurt you.”

And I could fucking kill him for saying something so cliché, but he means it so earnestly.

“I would never hurt you. Nothing ha—“

“Stop it!” Something shatters in my throat with the shout. It seems impossibly loud. I press on wildly, the words so fucking ugly sounding that it hurts. “Stop saying that! That – nothing – ha—“ The strain is too much, I can’t breathe now, I’ve done something horrible to myself, pushed too hard and broke something, the dry little rasp bursting from exertion. . The next breath rushes up with violence, leaves shaking, sore and ragged over my throat, like I can’t ever get another air with it no matter how hard I try.

“Deimos?” This time when he grabs for me I let him, I dig my nails into his arms, fall over him, lungs sucking, diaphragm hitching, making the most wretched sounds with the struggle. It’s like being choked, the same finger-numb tingling feeling, the panic of suffocation.

He’s trying to pull away, speaking at me so fast and urgently I can’t understand, can’t hear over the rocks-on-glass shatter from my throat. He keeps trying to leave, I’m going to claw him bloody, he’s going to drag me off the bed if he moves anymore.

A second voice now, equally hysteric, alto rough when I expect it to be honey, and then water, cold water, being forced on me so that I choke, sputter, the coughing’s at least better than arid, airless desperation.  More water, until things aren’t so dire, I can think clearly, the rush of senseless noise breaks into words.

“—to him, Praxis!”

“Nothing, Ethos, I swear.”

_Stop saying that._

The little navigator’s scratchy voiced from puking, pale across the cheeks, pinch-eyed with the strength of his hang over, but unexpectedly furious. He’s not looking so much like a lamb, snipping at the lion like he is. “I’m not stupid, Praxis. I know how fighters are.”

I shove the glass of water away. Try to pry myself free of him, shaky and unsure, secretly relieved and full of self-loathing when he’s reluctant about it, overly courteous. I find the edge of the bed and slump over it, head in my hands, just trying to breathe. There’s a fire in my throat, a ringing in my ears, the echoing force of my ugly little voice saying ugly little things.

The hand on my shoulder is too small to be the fighter’s. It’s the navigator who stands next to me, draws me into his protection. I need a fucking lamb to protect me, a little murderous lamb with a steel core. “I swear, if you’ve hurt him—“

“Ethos, nothing happened.”

 _Stop saying that it’s nothing!_ I grip my hands into my hair tighter, tight enough that my eyes water. I stare at the floor until it my focus slips, a watery blur, until I don’t have to think about it anymore. From the corner of my eye I spot my boots, tumbled together with the navigator’s at the base of my ladder.

I shove up from the bed. Ignore both of them asking after me. Shove into my boots. I go halfway up the ladder until I spot my jacket, crumple within the bedding just where I left it. Got my knives back, at least, but not even their warmth is enough to comfort me, not with the looks the two of them are giving me.

I don’t want to meet the weight of the lopsided gaze, all the more crooked for the fact he still hasn’t gotten the patch back into the right place. I look at the navigator instead, incline my head a little. _Thanks for the drink._

Because I didn’t break down in front of them, didn’t get myself too wrapped up in a lot of _nothing_ , since _nothing_ happened last night. Just drinks and a goddamn murder plot, a mouse and a lamb plotting revenge. Nothing else happened, just like the fighter says. Lift my hand to him, just a small wave. _See you later._ Still not looking at the fighter. Still not going to think about him.

I make it all to the lift, down the hall, into my room. Shed my clothes in front of the dresser. Step into the shower. Run the water to scalding. Think it’s going to be okay for a moment, and then break. Not even drunk this time, just hurt and scared and so fucking sick of myself. I wrap my arms over the pain in my chest and put my face under the rush of hot water so I can’t feel the tears. I can taste them, bitter, broken.

I put one arm against the wall, bracing my weight. Adjust my stance. Don’t want to think about it, have to think about it, warm and safe, stupidly drunk. Wrap a hand around my cock. Get hard without trying, remembering the soft snore of his breathing, the heat of his mouth, his tongue probing against my teeth, slicking over my fumbling, clumsy efforts. Breathing hard now, head down, the spray of the shower beating against at my hair. Thinking about his hands on me, washing over my skin, the water turning red, feeling so small and meek in the strength of his arms. Faster, harder, want to think about him fucking me, spreading me open with nothing but spit and his fingers, press of the floor into my hips and ribs. Him running a hand over my cock, so fucking gentle it hurts, I’m wrapped into his chest, he’s holding me, petting my hair, so fucking gentle—

I lean my forehead into my arm and cry, huge heaving silent sobs, tugging out the last of something that’s shameful and needy. Ejaculate and tears swirl down the drain, washed clean by the shower spray, but I feel dirtier than ever. My chest hurts, something beating up against my ribs like a caged bird. I slump to the hard tile floor and draw my knees to my chest, like maybe I can hold in all the hurt. I sit there until the water turns cold and everything’s numb.


	17. Chapter 17

Breakfast, training, running sims, lunch, more training, dinner, sitting alone in my room, sleepless nights, back to breakfast again, training until my lungs burst, ignoring three sets of stares and fourth set of eyes at meals with the monochrome divide.

He finds me somehow, it isn’t easy for a navigator who isn’t yours, but he’s clever and persistent. Wants to know what’s wrong, wants to know if I remember the plan, wants me to kill someone so we can both sleep at night. Tries to say a fighter’s task name like it means something. Lets me go because he’s sweet like honey, fluffy like a sheep.

Find a dark pair of eyes in a blocky face, broad across the shoulders and bull-headed like a fighter, cream-colored like the rest, stupid mohawk like anyone gives a shit about how tough he is. Pass a bottle of contraband that I won playing cards back and forth until I’m too drunk to care. Calls me the wrong task name because he’s drunk, but not too drunk to stay hard at least. Swallow him down until everything tastes like salt, put my face into the pillow and let him fuck me until everything tastes like salt again, bitter and broken. Go back to my room when he’s asleep.

Do the same thing a few days later, another bottle of contraband, something like rat poison and turpentine. Get so drunk I don’t care, let him wrap a hand through my hair, bruise my throat with his thrusts. Get on my hands and knees for him. Beg him to fuck me hard so it hurts, so I’m bleeding into the shower later. Get called the right task name this time, start to cry into the pillow where he can’t see. Go back to my room when he’s asleep.

Do the same thing a few days later, another bottle of contraband, already bruised and sore from earning it, show up thinking he’s just a stupid navigator so I’m safe. Get told he’s not there by his fighter. Go back to my room. Find him up the hilt in my navigator, the two of them a cream-colored beast with two backs. Both drunk. Get asked to join. Set the bottle down and leave.

Get yelled at by my navigator afterward, called a slut, blamed for everything. Don’t put up a fight. Black and blue later, can’t stop the staring. Get bruised again earning another bottle, drink it by myself. Get an apology and a warning from my navigator to stay away from his friend. Offer to let him fuck me instead. Laugh my ugly breathless laugh when he slaps me for it. Set up a truce built around ignoring each other.

Jerking off in the shower, trying not to think of anything, eating breakfast as I walk, training, simulations where I fuck up and get us killed, trying not to think about it, sleepless nights, stomach growling, drink so I can sleep, sit alone in my room, only venturing out when I have to, getting quieter and quieter without saying a word. 

 

 

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I recorded [audio](https://soundcloud.com/violetnyte/replacement-chapter-17-by) of this chapter


	18. Chapter 18

He finds me, and it’s my own damned fault. I’m coming up from the fighter base, from a carousing room of cards and smoke, drinks and fucking, typical fighter bullshit. Somewhere along the spectrum of hung over and drunk again, bruised up one side and down the other from earning shots of the rotgut poison in the first place, wandering back to my room too late because I’ve forgotten something important, something about staying alive.  

And then he steps out from around a corner, and it’s like a loose airlock popping. No breath, blood freezing, certain dread, a sick, helpless feeling that sobers me at once. A wide, slow smile spreads beneath the twisted scar of his face. The wolf, prowling at last, because I’m a fucking idiot.

I check behind me with the corner of my vision, not wanting to take my eyes off him entirely. No one on the lift with me, the little box of potential escape already gliding obediently through the bowels of the ship to find more passengers. Hallway ahead empty as well, closed doors and silence. Can’t scream, either, not with the way I’m broken. Little navigator nowhere in sight since this isn’t part of the plan, since I fucked up and forgot about the plan, lost myself in some stupid feeling sorry for myself misery.

He stalks closer, and my mind races through the piss poor options. I let him back me against the wall, right there in plain view of the lift and all those closed door. He smiles again, cold and cruel, because he’s not stupid no matter how much I want him to be. He grips my arm hard enough to bruise, pulls me out of sight.

I fall to the floor when he throws me. It seems safer to stay down than put up a fight. Maybe I can get myself out of this bad fucking luck of a situation somehow, but I’ve got to think for that, and I won’t be able to think if he starts beating on me right away. I look up at him, flinch, throw an arm up way too late to stop his boot, and stay down. Flat to the floor, hands over the back of my head, heart racing and anger boiling inside me. Mad at myself for fucking up, mad at him for everything.

His hand tangles into the neck of my jacket. He jerks me upright, to my knees. My fingers trace the hidden knife in my boot. I’m somewhere between hung over and drunk, sober enough with fear to fight, but probably not enough to win.

“Hello, slut,” he says. Caresses the words, vicious and teasing. “Miss me?”

I could probably get the knife out without him noticing if I was smart about it, quick about it. He lays his hand against my cheek in a mockery of affection. The slap takes me off guard only because I’m too busy thinking about where I’ll swing once I get the knife free. I have to force myself to act meek, to let him knock me around until he realizes I’m not putting up a fight this time. He frowns over me as I spit blood to the floor and wipe the back of my hand over my mouth.

He doesn’t say anything, just snarls and grabs for his belt and flicks open the clasp. I shudder as the band slides free, a shucking snap of fabric, the sound of sleepless nights and jarring awake in a cold sweat. He takes hold of my arm, drags me upright, slams me into the wall hard enough I see stars for a moment.

If I wait until he’s in me, he’ll be distracted. It’s not part of the plan, since the little navigator’s nowhere around, but it’s my only chance. My breath comes a little faster, my heart beats a little stronger. I don’t want his hands on me, I don’t want him to fumble over my belt and pants. I don’t want his breath in my ear or the heat of him so terrifying close. His teeth find my earlobe, biting, nibbling, teasing. I turn my face away, it’s the most I can do to hide, to run, to fight.

I’ve still on my jacket, I’ve still got my knives. Maybe he’s distracted enough now. I hate the way I’m trembling, the slick of sweat across my palms. I hope I won’t drop the knife.

His mouth moves lower, into my neck. His teeth graze at the beat of my pulse, nipping, teasing, threatening. His hand plunges down the back of my pants as he bites, hard, and I can’t decide if he’s hurting more with his teeth or the dry invasion of his finger.

He snarls, thrusts at me with burning cruelty, I’m so tense and tight with fear it’s like my first time again, the acrid tang of blood in my mouth and the rib-cage burst of my terror. “What’s the matter, slut? Forgotten how bad you want it?” He licks the blood from the bite.

Before I can palm the knife and take the risk, the sudden loud ring of a fighter’s boots against the floor echoes down the narrow hall. It is like fucking angel’s singing, because it means we’re not alone. The footsteps pause, stop. I’m against the wall, he’s behind me, a dark shadow in shadows, it’s the military, no reason to think I don’t want it since I’m not moving, not putting up a fight. I’m so scared that if I fight him again I’ll lose, so maybe it’s better that I just let him. Can’t lose a fight again if I don’t start one. I scrunch my eyes shut and claw at the wall. Plead with the footsteps to come closer, and they do. I hear the shift of them as the fighter changes directions, the quick, brisk stride that’s at once something hurried and something lax.

The wolf growls and ruts at me like the beast he is, like maybe he can’t hear the footsteps even though a fighter’s boots are loud. He shoves at the waistband of my pants, pushing them over the curve of my ass, and knocks my knees apart with his. I grit my teeth against a scream. The footsteps come closer. I force my eyes open, turn my face to see.

The mad dog, strolling toward us like taking a walk in the park, so fucking full of pride it hurts, the wisped curl of his smoke streaming above him like a banner. The twist of pain in my stomach is disappointment, because my gaze went instinctively to his face, to the two whole sides of his sneering glare. I don’t know what good a dog will be against a wolf, not when they’re so similar. Not much difference between them, both wild and feral, dangerous and unpredictable, and I wonder what the fuck is wrong with me that I’m thinking like this.

He snubs the cigarette out on the wall as he walks, palms the remainder, and shakes free another from his pack. Lets it dangle on his lips unlit. It bobs as he calls out. “Hey.”

The wolf raises up from his prey. He shoves a hand into my shoulder, keeping me to the wall, and turns a half-cocked salute toward the interruption. He can’t get it up if I’m not fighting him, and the thought makes me feel slightly hysterical. “What the fuck,” he growls.

The dog stops just out of reach. He plucks the unlit cigarette from his mouth and gestures with it. “Got a light?”

“I’m fucking busy,” snaps the wolf. Teeth gleaming with my blood, no doubt.

“Yeah.” The dog shifts his weight. He runs his eyes over the scene, long and slow, burning shame into every inch of me. The knives sing a cold reminder of how worthless I am, put under his gaze like this. Our eyes meet for a moment, until I flinch away. He says to me, “ _Chto takoje?_ ”

The wolf tenses, it’s clear he doesn’t understand. He’s too dark, not the right kind of dusky, his words sharp at the end with the wrong kind of accent, he’s colonial but not like us. And the dog knows it, but isn’t willing to risk it with a more direct question.

The hand at my shoulder digs into the fabric of my jacket in silent warning. I’m not so beaten as that, or maybe I’m beaten more than he thinks, in the wrong kind of way. I look up at the dog and shake my head, just a fractional amount. My lips part, but no sound comes out. I look down again. _Please help._

“I asked if you got a light,” he says. There is all kinds of dark, delicious threat rumbling through the words, seeping into my bones and running along my nerves and, fuck, I’m hard so fast despite everything else, because that voice goes right between my legs like it belongs. I take short, quick little breaths through my nose, tense all over and shaking.

The wolf shoves off from me. I stay clung to the wall, head down, watching through my hair, not sure which way this is going to go and all the more terrified for it. The dog calmly pulls out his lighter and cups the flame until the cherry burns a bright, menacing red.

And that’s the end of it. The wolf hoists his pants closed, threads his belt through again, all while stalking away with his tail between his legs. I can feel the heat of his glare, feel the sizzle of his promise of revenge, and I edge back from the wall to start putting myself together.

He just stands there watching, smoking his cigarette, head tipped to one side like he’s studying some fancy piece of art in a fancy fucking gallery. So calm and collected when I’m a shaking mess somewhere between drunk and hung over, sliding my pants over the shameful evidence of my arousal, all because his voice has fucked me up more than I already am.

“Recognized your handiwork, myshonok.” He traces a diagonal line over his face and grins, sharp, gleaming, dangerous. “You were always shit at break ups.”

I swallow something painful and nod.

He shakes his head slightly, each little side to side swing of it a stab into my chest so that I’m bleeding ache and misery and shame by the time he stops, shifts his weight again. Takes a long drag of his smoke. Holds it, lets it out slow, right in my face, and my cock jumps, straining against the clasp of my uniform. I bite my lip and hope he can’t see even though I know he can.

“Fuck,” he says. He scowls, shakes his head again, chucks the cigarette to the side. He comes closer, into my space, tilting my slow, spiraling orbit with his gravity. He presses at the wound on my neck until it stings, sharp, wet. His fingers come away glistening crimson with my blood.

We stare at each other, I’m hypnotized, horrified, watching the slow way he licks the blood from his fingers. I shiver with the strength of my desire, the way I’m hard for him, straining, weeping, weak-kneed and fluttering. My lips part, but I don’t say anything.

“You’re such a fucking mess, kiddo.”

I nod, quick, eager, tipped towards him without touching, dangling on an invisible string so pliable and willing, terrified to my core and loving every horrible heartbeat. It’s dark and dangerous, desirable, desperate, I’m breathing short, quick little pants through my half-open mouth.

“Fuck,” he says again. He’s so calm and collected, tense in a way that’s violent rather than nervous. I’m something distasteful in his eyes, a chore, a responsibility he doesn’t want. “Don’t fuck around with a psychopath like that. He’ll kill you.”

I nod, quick, eager, because he’s right, he knows me better than I know myself.

“You’re such a fucking mess.” He sighs, runs an affectionate hand through my hair, and then I’m on him. I can’t stop. He smells like smoke and sweat, acrid and sharp. I bury my face into his neck and pull my thigh against his, rubbing at him like a bitch in heat, so fucking scared and shaken from everything and just wanting him close for as many heartbeats as I can, like when we were recruits curled together in a skinny bunk.

He resists, pushing at my shoulder but not hard enough to dislodge me. “Cut it out, Deimos.”

I clutch at his back and thread my fingers into his hair and scrub my cheek against his jaw before burying myself back down into him, clinging so tight because I just want him close to me and I’m so fucking scared.

He shoves again. “I’m serious, you asshole. What if someone sees you? You’ve got no fucking sense.” I’m still not letting go, so he wedges a knee between us and kicks me away. 

When he stands over me, I flinch, hands over the back of my head, curled over the ache in my chest, the furious beat of my heart and the throb of my cock. The leather of his boots creaks as he squats, knees apart, arms across them, still so relaxed and easy about thing. He’s got all the control, all the power, and he knows it. That’s why he keeps me around, that’s what he wants from me. I can be that for him, always, it’s the easiest in the world to cringe at his feet like the worthless little mouse I am.

His hand ruffles my hair. “Such a fucking mess.” He stands, looming over me, and I dare to peek out of my cowering. He looks down at me, sneers. Shakes his head. “Get up, then. Get the fuck up.”

I scramble to my feet and scrub a hand over my mouth, smearing away blood with the gesture.

He grabs my arm, hard enough to bruise, nothing gentle in the way he steers me into motion. “This better be the fucking end of it,” he says. “I don’t want you going around that fucking scarred up psychopath again. You need to get shoved around like that? You wanting it hard and fast? I know what you’ve been doing at night. You smell like cheap liquor and spunk. You’re such a fucking mess.”

I nod along, whatever he says, it’s all the truth, I’m just a broken mess of shattered glass for him to crunch beneath his boots. He drags me into some unused room, a cramped utility closet with barely enough space for the two of us. He shakes me, hard enough that my head rattles back and forth in boneless surrender.

“This better be the fucking end of it,” he says. “You get your shit together after this.”

I nod, or try to nod, but he’s still shaking me. He releases me, shoving me away from him. He’s stripping out of his jacket with angry, jerking gestures, muttering curses under his breath the whole time. He catches me staring and snaps, “Well? Get your fucking pants off.”

I realize what he wants, what he thinks I want, what’s happening, what he’s been talking about, why he’s attacking his belt, why the strap’s sliding free, why he’s tossing the belt on his jacket across the shelves. Why we’re in a utility closet, why I’m shaking, why I can’t breathe. It’s happening, this is happening, this is real it isn’t just some nightmare I can escape from, some dream I’m going to wake up from with a wet stain in the sheets and shame in my heart. I can’t stop shaking, I can’t feel anything, my hands fall over my belt like they’ve never seen clothes before.

“Give me that,” he snaps. There’s nothing gentle about the way he does it, ripping open the clasps, shoving at me, rough and frustrated, disgusted with me and what he’s having to do, taking this on like some chore, something he just has to do.

“Don’t you dare fucking let Abel know. You hear me? No little mousy whispering, no fucking looks.” He pulls his pants down without looking at me. Mutters, “Abel can’t ever know.”

The wet-eyed navigator, the one with the scar, he’s thinking about him even now, when he takes his cock in hand and strokes himself hard, not looking at me, not thinking about me. He leans back against the shelves, hand lazy over his erection, a flush in his face. Thinking about his navigator.

He wants me on my knees, my hot mouth eager, so I’ll suck his dick before he spreads me open and fucks the stupid out of me, fucks me so I don’t go let meaner beasts than a junkyard dog have their way. That’s what he wants from me. Because he thinks I want it, he knows I want him, I told him, my fractured ugly voice trying to tell him something beautiful so many long nights ago. He’s always known it, dragged me along all the same, taken me for granted and now offering me charity. A pity fuck.

I didn’t know I could hurt this much. That I still had this much in me left to break.  

I love him and I hate him so intensely in that one moment that I fear my heart may have stopped. I can’t think, can’t process this, can’t do anything other than sink to knees like a cheap, dirty whore. I set my hands against his hips and just don’t think about it. Just shut that part of my brain off, boarded up like an abandoned warehouse, some rotting piece of ruin that teenagers spray paint and smash, that someone lights on fire just to watch it burn, flames licking the sky like the way I’m licking the hard and soft flesh, acrid smoke like the taste of him, burning down into cold, forgotten ashes like the pain in my heart.

He wraps a hand through my hair, clenching and stroking in a way that’s almost tender. I look up at him. Eyes half-lidded, cheeks flushed, shoulders hunching, head thrown back. Not looking at me. Groans, “Just like that, sweetheart.”

I pull my head back, let him slip from my mouth with a thin thread of saliva still drooling between us. Keep my head down, because I can’t. I don’t want him to see how much I’ve broken.

He thinks it just means I’m ready, sighs like it’s some big chore, hauls me up, and turns me into the shelves. I keep my head down, don’t want him to see, set my hands into a bracing support. I can hear him slurping, licking at his finger, rubbing the wet head of his penis into my ass until he’s got his hand ready. I spread my legs for him, hot with shame, half limp with hurt, still half hard because he’s fondling at my balls, tracing his finger up the soft skin, swirling at my entrance. He’s going to be nice about it, he’s not trying to hurt me but there’s nothing gentle to it all the same.

I just want it over with, and he’s taking his time fingering me. Hand between the press of our hips, rubbing at the right angle, I can’t get it up despite the whipcord lashes of pleasure up my spine at the way he presses at my prostate, demanding that I enjoy this, when all I want is for it to be over. He curls a hand over my limp cock.

He growls in my ear, “You need it to hurt?” And then he bites my neck, opposite the wolf’s bite, not so hard as to draw blood but vicious all the same. I scrunch my eyes tight, hide my face into my arm, whine something out of my throat that he takes to mean I like it, that he’s giving me what I want.

His teeth rake along my shoulder as he scissors me open, still working his fingers. I hear his snarl of frustration when I fail to respond, stay pathetically limp in his hand. “I’m not gonna beat you,” he says. Like a warning, letting me know I should be lucky he’s doing as much as he is.

I nod against the press of my arm, still hiding my face, not wanting him to see.

He bites me again, more of a nibble, something almost affectionate, and stretches me open with a slow, easy thrust of his hips. He slides in deep, hissing at the pressure, the tightness, the flex of my muscles around his cock. A small, desperate sound works out of my throat. I get a soft erection as he starts pumping into me with deep, steady strokes.

He kisses the back of my neck, runs his hands through my hair, pulls my hips against his in time with his thrusts. He’s panting, sneering, picking up pace to fuck me hard, flesh slapping together, pulling almost all the way out before plunging deep again. He runs a hand under my shirt, pinches my nipples until it hurts, draws his nails down my chest and belly until he’s pumping at me with his hand again, jerking what’s still mostly soft.

“Fuck!” He gasps. “Fuck, damn! So good, princess, you’re so good.” He’s fucking me fast, hard, in and out, I’m rocking into the shelves with the rhythm of it, braced against my arms and limp.

I bite the flesh of my thumb, scrunch my eyes, breathe shallow and short. I curl my hands into the shelves, almost vibrating with the agony that bursts in my chest.

“Ah, fuck! I’m—“ He grabs my hip, crushing me to him so it’s good, hisses. Forgets what he’s doing, that I haven’t come, that I’m soft in his hand. Moans as he tightens, bucks, fills me with wet, hot, come. “ _Fuck_ , Abel!”

I can’t anymore. Breath hitching, eyes streaming, I sob into the shaking silence of his orgasm. And keep sobbing, big ugly heaves when I’d been quiet up until then, keeping my head down so he couldn’t see. He’s been fucking me while I cry, and now he knows it.

“The fuck!” Strangled, like he’s choking on something, heavy breathing.  He recoils from me so sharply that he’s still spurting when he pulls out. Wet drops of it drizzle across my back. I clutch at the shelves to keep myself upright.

“What the fuck?” He’s still breathing hard, barely able to talk, the sounds biting into the difficulty of his aftershock. He grabs my shoulder, trying to turn me to him, but I shrug away, miserable, ashamed, humiliated so completely that I wish I was dead, that I’d let the wolf shake me in his jaws until stars burst and nothing more.

“Deimos, what the fuck? What’s wrong with you?” He is so angry.

I hunch my shoulders, manage to quiet myself again, still crying but now he doesn’t have to hear it.

“Don’t give me that shit, you give me a fucking answer.” He pants more, still somewhat breathless, and swears a steady stream under his breath in a coarse, rolling language. I can hear his teeth grinding. “I didn’t hurt you,” he says. Like it’s more a question than anything, like he’s pretty sure he knows the answer but doesn’t want to actually ask.

I nod against my arm, curl tighter without really moving, and nod again.

“Fuck,” he mutters. He sighs, sets his clothes straight, fastens and buckles himself together.  The door glides open. He’s going to leave, because I’m making him too awkward, too angry. “I didn’t hurt you,” he snaps again. “Stop fucking crying over it. I gave you what you wanted.”


	19. Chapter 19

He opens the door to find a mess. Me, specifically, I don’t need a mirror to know I’m a mess. Been told it enough times, can feel it in the hot blood at my neck, the fresh bruises on my face, the grit and streaks of the tears, the too-warm stuffiness in my nose, the tender, drained-out feel of my eyes, and the slow trickle of wet down my thighs.

Shocked seems such a quaint way to describe his reaction. Both sides of his face pulling wide with it, he must have been sleeping, eye patch off, hair tousled just a little on the side from his pillow. He’s wearing thin, white cotton shorts and a grey tank top, not the standard issue fighter uniform but something civilian and soft looking. Why the fuck would anyone buy a grey tank top when Fleet stocks every drawer full of them? I stare at the fabric over his chest rather than the eyebrow-crawling surprise on his face.

“Deimos?” He doesn’t bother to whisper, because although the room behind him is dark, the little navigator isn’t likely to be asleep, not if I woke up the fighter by pressing continuously at their door panel.

I don’t even know what I’m doing here. I should have gone to my room, cleaned myself up, crawled into bed, and tried to forget. I should have gone to my room, run the shower so hot it burned, set a knife against my throat, and made myself forget. I can still feel him in me, fucking me, threading a hand through my hair and calling me the wrong task name. It was the only thing I ever really wanted, he was the only man I ever thought I truly wanted, and it had felt so hollow and worthless. I feel cheap, used up, too fucking broken to put the pieces together.

“Are you all right?” It’s a stupid question, because I’m clearly not, but he sounds so flummoxed that it’s more a gut reaction than anything. He doesn’t try to touch me. I don’t know if that’s because of last time or because he’s sick of me, disgusted by me, horrified at my filth. My clothes are crooked, loose, my hair’s tousled, I’ve got to look like I’ve just come from a hard fucking. I’m just some battered up slut at his doorstep, something he doesn’t want.

I can’t, I just fucking can’t anymore. I look up at him, braced to see the rejection in his face, the piteous guilt. I search for it, gaze bouncing over the lines against his mouth, the tight furrow of his brow, and the ruinous mimicry of the scarred over socket. Faster now, until I’m dizzy with it, staring and staring up at him because all I can see is warm concern, deep patience, overwhelming care.

I take a small step toward him. The grey fabric is soft against my cheek. I put my arms around him, slow at first, and then clutching, digging into him, curling my entire body to him, almost climbing him as I lift on to my toes and raise my arms, higher, tighter, around his neck and squeezing. He takes hold of me, my feet are hardly on the ground, I’m just suspended there against him, and he is so fucking gentle.

I’m shuddering and shivering in his arms, a high-pitched whine coming from my throat, clung to him for all I’m worth. I can’t cry anymore, all the sobs shaken out of me in a cold, cramped utility closet, but I want to cry again so fucking badly that the stupid high-pitched whine is all I can do. He has to feel the tremors coursing through me, it’s impossible for him not to, but he doesn’t ask again if I’m all right. He just hushes into my ear, voice thick and choking, “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

He steps back into the room, pulling me with him, and the door glides closed. It’s dark, just the faint glow from the control panel, and quiet. For a moment, and then, soft, peeping like the little lamb that he is, the navigator’s voice. “Praxis? What’s happening? What’s wrong?”

I can feel the fighter swallow, that’s how close I am to him. He hitches me against his chest and I lift further, legs wrapping over his waist, curled to him with our bodies touching wherever they can. He’s got my weight held so easily, so gently, cradling me to him.

“It’s fine, Ethos. Go back to sleep.” He can only lie like that because the room is so dark, because I’ve gone quiet, shivering in his arms, breath warm and slow against his neck.

I don’t think the little navigator believes him. He just says, “Okay,” in the drawn out, plaintive way of a child being denied an explanation for in the night noises. 

The fighter carries me the short distance to the bathroom. In the flash and fade of the sudden light as he pressed the panel open, I can see across the room to the bunks, where the navigator sits staring out so that I know he can see me. I bury my head back down, tighter than before, drawing my arms higher so that I’m hidden completely.

It’s a cramped, tiled space, nowhere to put me except on the counter, balanced over the edge of the sink, him still holding me so I can’t fall. I keep my legs pressed against his side, my shoulders hunched over him, desperate not to let him go ever again. He’s just so fucking gentle, standing there, and I can’t be making it comfortable. He rubs comfort into my back, runs his hand up and down the knots and knobs of my spine.

“Deimos,” he says. Quiet and slow, like I might spook right off the counter and out the door if he rushes. “Deimos, are you hurt?” So quiet and slow, patient, concerned for me and tense with it while still trying to sound calm for my sake.

I shake my head slightly and then change my mind, nod instead, up and down until the gesture becomes frantic. I’m so hurt, cut up inside and bleeding, that it’s stupid to answer any other way.

He swallows again, the sound almost loud enough to hear. “Where?”

I just cling to him, shaking all over.

He starts slow, prying me from him bit by bit. He cups the side of my face, careful not to press too hard at the fresh bruises, and then settles the big warmth of his hand against the back of my neck. He keeps his hand there, steadying me, as he checks what he can of me for injuries. He feels my ribs beneath my jacket and along the hip and thigh of my pants for holes, for wounds, for damp blood or anywhere that makes me cringe.

There’s only the bite at my neck, the wolf’s jaws where he shook me, maybe the lighter matching mark at the other side. I’m not hurt anywhere that shows. He rubs at the back of my neck. I can feel the weight of his gaze, but I’m staring between my knees, not really at anything, disconnected from the moment. I’m back in the utility closet, getting fucked while crying, hearing the wrong endearments, the wrong task name. Hearing him sigh like it’s a chore. Getting told it’s what I wanted.

The fighter leans my cheek into his shoulder and holds me there, tight and warm, but it doesn’t stop the shivering. He strokes my hair, kisses the top of my head. He doesn’t say anything, just helps me out of my jacket and hangs it up on the hook to avoid wrinkles, like I fucking care about my jacket getting wrinkled. He pulls me from the counter, slowly, cautiously, waiting to see if I’ll stand or if he needs to hold me up. I stay on my feet.

As the shower heats up, he helps me out of the rest of my clothes. Still going slow, like I’m going to balk at any moment, like I have the strength to care if he sees the motley pattern of bruises over hips and thighs, tangible reminders of how I’ve fucked around, earned bottles of contraband, been taken and abused because I don’t fucking care anymore.

I step out of my underwear, one hand on his shoulder for balance as he kneels. He’s setting everything aside with such exquisite care. He has to smell the sex on me, the filth of it, the shameful smear of semen between my legs. Fresh bruises and old bruises, fingerprints and handholds, more bruises deep inside where he can’t see. I’m trembling as he just kneels at my feet, head down, not saying anything.

At last he stands, puts a hand under the spray to check the water temperature, and then reaches to take my hand. He steps into the shower and pulls me in after him. The glass rolls shut behind him, so it’s just our naked bodies, the falling water, and clouds of steam.

He takes me into his arms slowly, still acting like I’m going to be afraid of him. He finds the soap and starts to wash my back. I let him, because it feels nice, and the hot water beats away the raw, shivering feeling. I’m quiet, not just silent but deeper than that, calm all the way down and so, so quiet.

“It’s okay,” he says softly. Soap lather follows the sweep of his hand down my arm. He’s got one arm around my waist, loose, bicep flexing but so gentle, like if I put up even the tiniest amount of resistance he’d let me go. And I don’t want him to, ever, so I sag against him like a doll, placid and willing, pliable and lifeless as he works between my fingers and rubs each little joint. He holds my hand into the spray, the soap running clear, and then lifts the limp curl of my hand to his mouth. He kisses the back of my knuckles.

“It’s okay,” he says again. He turns me slightly, shifting me into his side so he can wash my chest. He leans down, lips close to my ear, like a little sideways hug as he scrubs lather into the delicate bird-wing curve of my collarbone. “I know you didn’t want this,” he says. Soothing, hushing, reassuring me with it.

Because that’s what he thinks, that I’ve gone out and lost some fight again. He doesn’t know I did this to myself, that I wanted this to happen. Numb cold rises up and drowns the sudden spike of pain. He wouldn’t be this gentle if he knew the truth. He’s being so gentle because that’s what he thinks, that I lost some fight, that I wasn’t willing, that it’s the wolf whose filth drains off my thighs and into the drain. And it’s so fucking unfair that I didn’t know there were any pieces of me still big enough to break.

I start to shake again, violently, knees knocking together so much it makes me weak. I’m pulsating with the strength of how much it hurts, how much I just can’t handle anything more. His gentleness is now hurting me, twisting and clawing me open. I shake and shake, the vibration drawing that high-pitched whine from my throat again, like some wounded, dying creature.   

He stops, stills, grips me hard for just a second before remembering to be loose, lax, unthreatening. He thinks I’ve lost some fight again, like I’m going to start crawling at the walls and being afraid of shadows. “I know,” he says, aching with misplacement sympathy. “It’s okay, Deimos. I know.  It’s okay.”

And it’s not, it’s not okay, because hot tears start pouring down my face. I’m surprise it’s not blood, how drained out and dry I feel already. I’m honestly surprised I have anymore crying left in me, but I do, and it shatters into wretched, horrible sobs again, so that I actually ball a fist into my face like some stupid child.

He flutters over me with concern, trying to comfort without scaring me, and every nice little pat and stroke and half-hug just hurts me all the deeper. “Deimos, it’s okay. You’re okay now. I—“

“Sssstt—“ I gulp air, get mostly shower spray. He sees me struggling and turns the water off, so we’re dripping wet and surrounded by steam in a cold, tiled chamber. “St-st-stop—“ Fuck, it’s so ugly, my voice, raw and rasping, small and beaten. “Stop _saying_ that.”

He quiets, strokes the damp hair from my face. Hesitates and then says, “It’s not your fault. You didn’t—”

“I wanted it.”

There, I’ve said it. It actually makes me gasp, sob harder, try to turn away from him, flailing a tear-blinded hand into the wet glass. He snatches for me, it’s a sudden struggle, and then he pins me to his chest, my arms crossed over my stomach, wrists held in his big gentle hands. He hunches over me, trapping me so thoroughly that it’s terrifying.

It doesn’t make sense, I don’t understand, I don’t know why I tremble all the harder and my vision blacks for a moment and my thoughts tilt sideways, it’s that jarring awake in a cold sweat type feeling, stumbling without moving. I jerk against the constraint, the whine pitching with panic, until he realizes that he’s actually scared me, that I’m scared of him, bone-deep terror like I never would have thought possible and not just because he’s gentle but because I’m suppose to be strong.

My struggle weakens, my knees are giving out, everything’s still black and buzzing, I don’t know what’s happening – he’s speaking at me, quick and urgent, and then we’re kneeling on the cramped tile floor with my shoulders in his hands. His face is white, his eye huge, he’s tipped forward and so anxious, just as afraid as I feel, and I don’t know why.

“Deimos? Shit, Deimos, don’t faint. Stay with me.” He pats at my cheek, soft, fluttering, desperate. “Try to breathe slow, it’s okay, I’m so sorry—“

I lift my arms free of him, shake my head, pull myself together. Glare at him.

Relief cascades over his face. We stare at each other. He brings his lower lip into his teeth, bites it, worrying over something and staring at me for it. “Deimos, I’m sorry. I hate that I’m always having to apologize to you like this. I just – I want to help you. I want to make things better. Will you please tell me what happened tonight?”

It’s the most we’ve ever said to each other. I don’t know why that sudden thought occurs to me, but it does. All we’ve been through together, and we’ve never had a goddamn conversation, just fucking and breaking and blood, showers and gentleness and holding, always desperate and fighting and hurting. It’s not funny, but I laugh, that brittle, breaking sound I make that’s ugly, too breathless and dry like choking. I bring my hand to my mouth, quick, fleetingly ashamed.

He blinks, realizes what’s happened, and laughs as well, chuckling and all together too nervous, but it makes me laugh harder, I can’t stop, it’s not even fucking funny, I’m going to cry again it’s not even so funny, and I do, a little, sob until I can get a handle on myself.

I scrub at my face, curl my knees to my chest, settling so it’s more comfortable. He does the same, rolling the glass back so to let his long legs stick out across the rest of the tile, sitting back against the wall of the shower and watching me.

I speak slowly, haltingly, trying to ignore the hated sound of my little ruined voice, trying not to think about what I’m saying. “Logos found me. Couldn’t fight him. Cain found me. Scared Logos off.” Pause, breathe deep, let it out slow. Gotta say it quick, don’t think about it, just do it, like pulling a bandage. “Cain fucked me.”

There, I’ve said it. Flat, broken, simple little sentences all packaged up neatly into a row for him to open like Christmas presents. He doesn’t say anything. I lift my eyes from my knees and find him watching me, expression quickly blank, unreadable, but for a moment I see something that makes me cringe, form a tighter ball, hate myself.

“Did he hurt you?” He asks it slow, teeth grit, something dangerous and protective that makes me feel fluttery without knowing why.

I shake my head, because I know what he means. It hurt, but not in the way he’s asking. He was nice about it, even if he wasn’t gentle, fucking me like he thought I wanted – like I had wanted, for years – I grip my hands over my head, tuck my face into my knees.

“Did you want him to… do that to you?

I nod.

He tilts his head back against the shower wall. Stares up at the matte light panel. “Did you like it?”

I hesitate, and then slowly shake my head. “Hated it,” I whisper. I curl my knees tighter, folding myself over them, hating the shaky-weak feeling and the tossing, turning, heaving disgust in my stomach. For a moment I’m there again, in a dark utility closet, rocking against the shelves with bitter tears on my face.

“Deimos… Did you tell him that?”

I shake my head, cringe more. “Didn’t fight. Let him.”

“Let him,” he repeats. Softly, slowly, the ways he says it making me uncurl some, glance fearfully over at him. “Had he… Have you…? Before? With him?”

I shake my head.

Something passes over his face like a shudder. I can see the way he swallows, trying to be calm about it, as he asks, “Would you still want him to? Again?”

I think about it, really think about it, and then shake my head. I close my eyes, feel something within me unhook and fall. It drags a few leaking tears down my cheeks. “Never.”

The side of his thumb is rough, calloused, the edge of his nail blunt and smooth as he brushes under my eye, wetting the tears away. I open my eyes and he’s there, leaned close, the space between us still somewhat open so I don’t feel so panicky about it. “If you could go back,” he asks quietly. “Feeling like you do now. Would you still want him to?”

And I don’t say anything for a moment, just stare at him.

“Would you?” he asks again, demanding, but soft about it, so I don’t think he’ll be mad no matter how I answer. Like the answer doesn’t matter to him, not like it matters to me.

“No,” I say. Say it, rather than shake my head. I clench my jaw for a moment, remember a lot of nights in a skinny bunk, my first kiss, the beautiful thing I tried to say in my ugly little voice. “No,” I say again. “Wouldn’t want it.”

“Then, you’d stop him? If you could go back, would you have tried to stop it? If you could,” he emphasizes, quickly. “Not by fighting him, either. Just, I don’t know, there’s a button you can press, and it doesn’t happen.”

It makes me smile, his flustering persistence, the way he’s trying not to blame me but still trying to get at something all the same. I know what he’s getting at, the point he’s trying to make, and I hunch my shoulders under the weight of it. “Yeah,” I say. Small and whispering, and not just because it has to be.

He folds me into a hug, drawing me close to his chest. I go willingly, put my arms around him, cling at him even though it’s such an awkward angle. He strokes a hand over my wet hair, scratches a little at the base of my skull, pulls me to him with a sigh. “Then you didn’t really want it, did you?”

I tense, wondering if that’s the way it has to be for him, if he wasn’t just trying to make me feel better but needing to make himself feel better. If I’ve got to be something broken for him to want me like this, but I’m so fucking worn ragged and too hurt to pretend like I’m not broken, so I don’t even know what to think.

He stills, tenses along with me. “Deimos? What’s wrong?”

I shrug, flinching out of the hug.

He studied me for a moment, curls the wet strands of my hair behind my ear. Holds his hand against the side of my face, warm and gentle. “Even if you did,” he says. “I wouldn’t—“ He swallows, because he can’t say it, he’s realizing it’s a lie. He pauses, doesn’t look at me for a second, and it hurts so fucking much when I’m just so tired of hurting.

Before I can pull away, he curls his fingers through my hair again, the gesture so sweet and tender that it unsettles me. He looks at me very intensely, braces himself, and says, “Deimos, I can’t tell you that it wouldn’t matter to me. I’m sorry.”

At least he’s honest. And it kills me, makes me wish I’d gone and taken a shower by myself, slit my throat, left the water running to wash the blood down the drain. Spare my navigator the mess, he’d appreciate that.

He grips the back of my neck, shakes me some, demanding my attention. “It’s because you matter to me,” he says. Tone fierce, a lion’s proud growling, gaze blazing so that it makes me forget he’s only got one dark eye and a scar rather than something whole. “It matters to me if you’re out there getting hurt, if – Deimos, it matters to me who you’re with. Because—“ He breaks for a moment, lips twitching, something like a snarl, he’s getting himself worked up and almost angry about it, flustered like a school boy with a fist full of grimy wildflowers. “Because I want to be the one you’re with,” he says.

I don’t even know what to say. It’s like having gotten sucker-punched, breathless and shaken, eyes rounder than some fluff navigator before I bring my brow down, frown, glare, scowl, abruptly furious and unsure because I don’t know what to say, how to feel. I lift my arms, turn my face away, flinching back away from him because I just don’t know what to do otherwise except hide.

His hand falls away. He leans back. He’s so tense, I can feel him even though we’re not touching anymore. “I’m sorry,” he says quietly. Little pinpricks of fear and loathing bloom across my shoulders, and I hunch down like expecting a blow. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why I can’t say anything to him, why I have to be so fucking afraid.

“I’ve apologized for a lot,” he says, “but never for what I should have in the first place. I just…” The sigh draws my arms apart, lowers me out of my cringing recoil, makes me look at him with big round eyes like the moon, like some fucking navigator. He’s looking aside, not at me, struggling through something more to say like we both haven’t already said enough. “I just didn’t want to have to think about it. What I did to you.”

And I have no idea what the possible fuck he could be talking about, because the only thing I can think of is when we kissed, when _nothing happened_ , but I didn’t think he understood, he said so himself, kissing is just nothing. I know it’s a dumb fucking thing of me to care about, doesn’t stop me from feeling that way. My scowl deepens.

He pushes himself to his feet, doesn’t look at me while doing it. He’s going to leave, I guess, because it’s awkward. I scramble up after him, fast enough that he notices and actually looks at me. Hang-dog, like a kicked puppy, shoulders slumped. I puff air at him, realize he doesn’t understand, and say, “Don’t understand.” He still doesn’t explain, just gives a long, pitying look, so I try again. I have to swallow first, I haven’t used my voice this much since I lost it, since maybe even before that, since joining Fleet, since times I don’t think about, since people I can’t remember. Swallow again, because I’m nervous. “Why – sorry?” That’s all I can manage, so whisper soft it hardly counts as speaking.

A stricken look passes over his face. “Deimos, I—“ He runs a hand over his face, pulling at the scarred empty socket in such a way that’s almost grotesque. “I raped you.”

I punch him.

Don’t even think about it, might not have done it if I thought about it, but it’s a gut fucking reaction where my hand just forms a fist and goes straight into his jaw. He staggers back into the opposite corner of the shower, nearly slips on the wet tile, and makes a big fucking noise about it catching his balance. I hit him again, on the shoulder this time, so furious I’m shaking from head to toe, taught like a piano wire.

He gapes at me, slack-jawed, already starting to bruise where I clocked him. I lift my fist again, and he flinches but doesn’t stop me. I hit his shoulder, not trying to hurt him so much as just express myself in all the ways my shattered voice lacks.

“No!” I struggle not to yell so I won’t fracture like last time. I hit him again, and again, until he retreats all the way out of the shower with his hand up in surrender. I follow him, done smacking him but still wanting to make my point all the same. “Wanted it!” I grimace, put a sudden hand to my throat, and turn away long enough to drink water straight from the faucet, lapping at the cold stream with my tongue.

I face him again to see he’s just staring at me, inched back into the wall because the space is so small there’s not really anywhere to go. His brow twitches, his whole expression flickers, he sounds half-strangled and choking as he says, “What do you mean?”

I glare at him, puff air, so fucking frustrated because I’m not sure I can explain it without writing a fucking letter. My throat’s starting to ache, strained to the point of surrender, and I have to get close to him so he can hear me. He flattens back to the wall, like I’m going to hit him again, and I roll my eyes at him. I grip a hand into the wet tangle of his hair and pull him to me, mouth against his ear. “Let you. Wanted to. Didn’t fight.”

“Let me,” he says. In the same soft and slow way, so it shivers over my spine. “Deimos, I held you down, I—“

I swat his shoulder, just enough to shut him up. I scowl up at him, so fucking frustrated, so embarrassed I could melt into the tile, so mad at him for making me talk this way. “Liked it.”

His eye widens, and then just as swiftly narrows. He turns his face from me, shakes his head, low and mournful. “It was wrong of me. I never should have done that to you. I thought, maybe, that last time, you… But it was still wrong. You shouldn’t just _let_ people treat you like that. Not even me.”

I flick my hand, not hitting him, but gesturing away the words away with a violence motion. “Did you? Want to.”

“No,” he says, bitter, thick. “Not like that. Not the way it happened.”

“Would you? Again.” I lift my chin, stretching my throat, pleading at the damaged ruin to work for just a little bit longer, because this isn’t something I can convey with a gesture or shrug like a fucking game of charades, but I do have to mime the next bit, pretending like I’m pushing a button, just like his stupid flustering example earlier. “But different.”

It makes him smile just like it made me smile, because it’s a stupid game of second chances we’re playing. He looks at me, really looks at me, meeting the intensity of my gaze. His face softens. “Yes.”

I nod, suddenly awkward again, remembering what he said about wanting to be with me, not sure what to fucking do or say now that he’s smiling at me and telling me— I back away slightly, done talking, I’ve used up all the words there are to give. I’m tired, ill from having cried so much, worn out and exhausted and my thoughts so jumbled up it hurts.

When he touches my shoulder I startle, jolting in such a way that it’s all the more awkward between us. “Do you want…?” He frowns, the gesture pulling at the scar, highlighting the tense brackets around his mouth. “Will you stay here tonight? I won’t – we don’t have to do anything.”

I nod a little, trying not to seem shy about it.

He finds his tank top and shorts, turning his back to me, fussing over the clothes like they’re more complicated than they really are. “I’ll let you – when you’re ready,” he says.

Because I still need to finish showering, only he’s nice enough not to point that out. I wait until he’s left and do a quick job of it, not even waiting for the water to heat. I try not to think about anything, scrunch my face into the water, try to relax and not be so fucking tense as I rid my body of its shame, of all the filth, letting the viscous grit run down my legs and into the drain. I scrub the soap over the bruises, the fingerprints and handholds, like the lather will wash the marks from my dusky skin, maybe wash away the dust as well, turn me cream-colored and pure for him.

I should have asked him for a change of clothes, maybe another dove-colored tank top, downy soft and smooth. I bite my lip, hesitate, turn the light off before opening the door. My foot hits something soft on the floor. It’s a little pile of fabric that I’ve kicked, a civilian t-shirt and some underwear, both of which are far too big for me but are infinitely better than either nothing or my own soiled clothes again.

I walk a little further, straining to have my eyes adjust. The rooms are all the same in the Sleipnir, so I can guess where the bunk’s located by the way I feel along the edge of the dresser. I kick something soft again and have to kneel to figure out what it is.

His hand finds me first, brushing very slowly and cautiously over my knee. “Here,” he whispers. “I’m right here.” He threads our fingers together and pulls me toward him so that I have to crawl along the softness. It’s the mattresses, set together on the floor again. My vision’s adapting to the dark gloom that I can see the pale lump against the far side of the wall.

“Ethos must have put it together,” he whispers. “But he’s asleep already.” He doesn’t bother reminding me to be quiet about it. We settle down next to each other, close enough that I can feel his breath on my face but not really touching, just the tight clasp of our hands on the bed, caught between our staring.

He starts to lean forward, stops just shy of it. Our foreheads touch, and then he starts to lean back again, putting space between us. I’m the one who follows after him, leading with my nose, so fucking clumsy as I bash my face into his as I bring our lips together for a kiss. He hesitates, and then his mouth opens beneath mine.

It’s deep and plunging, heat like melted butter and just as savory, as more parts of us touch. His hand against my cheek, my hand on his arm, and still our fingers threaded, that one hand caught between us. My knees bump his and we shift, tangling, finding the places where we can fit together easily. Our hips come together, the both of us starting to feel aroused, warmth and stiffness, growing. We rub, exploring, just touching, still kissing, silent but for the quickened gasps of our shared breathes.

I’m the one who stops, breaks us away slowly, starting at the toes and going up in a wave. He thrusts at me just the once, trying to keep the connection, hard whereas I can only manage something that’s still just as half-soft as I was in the utility closet. I place a final, nipping kiss on his lips and pull away more, so that we’re just holding hands again, facing each other, close enough to touch but not.

He squeezes my hand and doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t act like it’s a big deal, like he doesn't want more than I’m willing to give, like he knows I’m shaken somewhere deep inside where it still hurts. Just squeezes my hand, doesn’t let go, even as he nestles his head into the pillow to sleep. Even though I’m tired, I fight to stay awake, because it’s one those moments I’m trying to keep forever. 


	20. Chapter 20

_He’s holding me down, kissing my neck, pawing at my hair, voice just a rumble, growling, loud and then soft like ocean tide, rising over me and under me and everywhere. It’s hands, pulling, pushing, stroking, and mouth, nipping, tasting, licking, biting, and pressure, thrusting, rocking me into the braced support of my arms. There’s wet across my face, the rhythm pressing grit and salt into my cheeks, and such an ache in my chest I can’t breathe._

_He leans into me, gentle, hushes with affection, “Just like that, sweetheart.”_

_And I can’t get away, I’m so helpless, so broken, everything’s changing but I’m still the same, still scared, still hurting, but it’s all different now and still the same. He’s moving into me, faster, harder, there’s the tang of copper and sweat in my mouth, cold like fear and hot like panic. He grips my hair, pulls my head back, puts the panted hatred of his mouth close to me, intimate and unwanted, whispers, “So good, princess.”_

_And then he slams my head down so I see stars, laughs and snarls, tells me, “Gonna fuck you raw” because there’s nothing I can do to stop him._

I wake, abruptly, knowing that it was just a dream but disoriented all the same. It’s that jarring upright in a panic feeling, chest too tight and breathing ragged. Cold sweat soaks across my shoulders and back, making me shiver, and when I scrub a hand over my face it comes away wet, gritty from dried tears.

I’ve woken him, or more like he was already awake. Sitting cross-legged on the bedding, already dressed, tablet in his hand and now forgotten, staring at me with open concern in his one eye, the other just a patched over shadow. He’s so close, and I’m suddenly embarrassed to realize I must have been curled against his side in my sleep. He isn’t touching me otherwise, hands clenched around his tablet in a way that says he wants to.

“Deimos?” he asks. “Are you awake now?”

Which is a dumb question, since I’m staring right back at him, but it makes me consider the tight, reluctant grip of his hands, the tense way he’s looking me. I wonder how long he’d been watching me dream, and how the hell I slept in later than any of them.

I nod, slowly, and rub at my face again. The bruises from last night make soft protest, little blooms of pain, but it doesn’t feel like it looks bad. Nothing’s cut except the inside of my cheek, and my lips feel whole and unbroken. The wolf didn’t bust me open this time. He’d only gotten started with me. The thought makes me shudder all the harder.

We’re the only two in the room, but I can hear the faint rush of the shower to tell me where the little navigator has gone. The fighter carefully releases his hold on the tablet before the casing snaps. Breath falls out of him in a rush. He slowly puts his hand on the back of mine and then, when I don’t flinch, don’t pull away but lean toward him instead, wraps his arm around me. He brushes aside my bangs, kisses my forehead, lips tickling and pleasant in a warm honey kind of way.

“Bad dream?” he asks quietly.

I nod.

He doesn’t ask what it was about, just pets at me with comfort until I straighten away, fussing at my clothes and the bedding, like they’re so goddamn important all of a sudden. Everything is awkward after last night. The clothes don’t fit, they’re his, making me look all the smaller and scrawnier, some fucking stray dragged home in the rain. My bruises are all in the brighter in the morning, with the lights on, making me wonder if he still wants me, still could see anything in me worth wanting if I manage to put my pieces together again. I’m not shaking in his arms, I’m not half-numb with hurt and fear. I’m just me, bed-headed and cranky from a stupid nightmare.

He catches me back, lightly, briefly, the hold on my arm so impossibly light as to be a suggestion rather than a command. He turns me to him, sways his face forward, but I turn from the kiss, heart pounding first with old, bone-deep reluctance. The moment stretches into uncomfortable, clumsy silence, him just holding me like a whisper, my face turned away with flinching rejection.

I am so goddamn scared of fucking this up that I’ve already ruined it.

He pulls at me, drawing me toward him, slow like I might bolt. I go along but remain stiff, unyielding, so tense because I don’t want to fuck it up but I am, I’m ruining it with every terrified heartbeat. He can’t possibly want me when it’s not about revenge, when it’s not about being broken. When it’s just me, scrawny and silent. He at least gets an eye patch to put over his scars.

He sets the crook of his thumb under my chin and pushes, forcing me to look up at him. I skitter my eyes over his gaze enough times without actually meeting it that he sighs, takes his hand away, sits there watching me.  I fidget more with the edge of the sheet, like it’s so goddamn important that I memorize the thread count.

“I know you don’t like to talk,” he says. “But I’m not a mind reader.”

I wince, shrug, desperately look anywhere but at him. I did enough talking last night.

He sighs again and runs a hand through his hair, tossing the shaggy silk back from his face. I can tell he wants to say something more, but he just sits looking at me instead. Kind of frustrated, mostly puzzled, brow and mouth all twisted up with concern. Like I’m some bug under a microscope, or really strange calibration results, like if he stares at me long enough I’ll crack and reveal all the tumultuous doubt and self-loathing buoying me through this awkward situation.

The shower cuts off, signaling the end of our time alone, and the situation is now all the more fucking awkward because I’m sitting here in the fighter’s too-big clothes on a pile of bedding and who the fuck knows where I was sleeping when the navigator woke up but it was probably somewhere huddled near his fighter.

He hears it same as I do, and the same sort of realization crosses his face, deepening all the frustration and worry. “I put your clothes there,” he says. He points to the dresser.

I turn to look at the folded pile of my uniform from last night, all packed into a bundle with such exquisite care. A funny sort of flutter starts in my stomach and rises up into my face at the memory of his gentle hands undressing me so slow and careful. I spin into him hastily, racing the silence from the shower and my own awkward flutter. Clumsy and stupid with it, forgetting where to put my nose and how much pressure to use, but I kiss him quick before I can change my mind.

He reacts with surprise, a half-second delay in which he’s just some frozen statue before he softens, melts, kisses me back with the same exquisite care as the folded clothes. I’ve got my eyes open, watching him, the too-close perspective almost dizzying, and it’s strange to see his one eye whisper shut with a serene sort of beauty. He’s just that one closed eye and the black shadow that almost swallows the whole of my view of him.

His hands find me, running up the length of my arms and gripping my shoulders, hot and needy, eager, bending me to him in the way that makes kissing so much more intimate than fucking. I try not to think about kissing Sacha, or the agonizing rhythm of the cramped utility closet, but both thoughts are too fresh, raw wounds bleeding out so as to make me feel jittery and exposed. I break first, flinching my face to the side and breathing hard, ragged, so that I’m hot and shivery in his hands.

I can tell there’s a question about to form in the small, strained distance between our faces, that sliver of silent, pleaded rejection where we’d been kissing only heartbeats ago. He’s looking at me, that one eye open again, dark and round like the moon’s shadow.

I twist to break his hold and for just a second his hands tighten, spooking the both of us with the way I tense and the abrupt way he changes his mind, almost shoves me away. I scramble for my clothes, fighting at them like I’ve never seen them before.

That’s when the bathroom door glides open, the little navigator standing there in a fresh milk-white uniform with a fresh-scrubbed pink-cheeked smile and the wet springy mass of his curls getting scrunched repeatedly into a towel. “Praxis, have you—?“ His big round eyes flick between the two of us, even rounder and bigger for the fact he’s clearly just caught us at something but doesn’t know what.

I gather up the clothes and keep my head down, bullying past the navigator so I can change in the scant privacy of the bathroom. We switch places, him on the outside, me on the inside. And to my absolute horror, when the navigator starts to talk I can hear almost every word even though he’s trying to be hushed about it.

“What’d you do this time?”

“Mind your own business, Ethos.”

“Well, it’s my business if you’re being a jerk again. Deimos is my friend.”

He is such a fucking lamb, bleating like anyone cares about his opinion. I tear the fighter’s too-big clothes from my skinny limbs, wishing to fuck they’d both shut up, horrified by how clear the sound carries, hoping my raspy little whisper was enough of a whisper last night.

“Ethos, I’m not like your old fighter. Get that through your head.” It’s a lion’s grumbling rumbling snarl, as scarred up and distinguished as he is, a mix of offended anger and gentle rebuff.

“I didn’t say that,” the navigator protests. “Praxis, I don’t think that at all.”

“Don’t you?” He’s moving around now, the fighter, I can hear the scrap of metal and the shuffle of something soft and heavy. The bunks. They’re setting the room together once more.

“No. I don’t.” Bleat, bleat, the little lamb’s pouting now, just some wet-eyed, cream-colored thing.

 “Then stop treating me like it,” says the fighter.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.” And his voice drops, so all I can hear is a hissing tangle of sounds that fail to form actual words as I shamelessly eavesdrop. I want to know what he’s saying to the navigator, what’s got him all puffed up and blustering.

“That’s not fair.” Like someone slapped him, all breathless and hurt about it. “Well, I – I’m not your old navigator, either!”

Now I’m stuck in the bathroom, dressed but waiting for them to stop arguing so I can make my escape. It’s ridiculous enough to warrant a laugh, if my laugh weren’t so fucking ugly.

“No,” says the fighter. “You’re not.”

I can’t for the life of me figure out what he means with that cold, distant tone, the clipped hush to it, all wrapped up in hurt and spiked thorns. There’s a final clang of metal, probably the ladder rungs, and then the soft, delicate tread of a navigator’s boots against the floor. Maybe I can hear the door glide open and whisk shut, or maybe I can just imagine it so sharply that it becomes real.

Since it seems like the navigator’s left in huffed-up pout, I brave leaving the temporary sanctuary of the bathroom. I was correct about the bunks, they’re jutting out from the wall once again. The fighter’s slinging sheets and pillows from the floor to the beds with careless, docile fury. It’s hard to be very angry about throwing something so soft and fluttery.

I think he won’t notice me, but that’s a dumb idea because it isn’t like there’s much else in the room to look at, even though I’m trying to sneak out around his blind side. Without looking like I’m sneaking, which is the tricky part, but at least I probably don’t look completely suspicious when he does look at me, slow and careful, like just the weight of gaze is going to be enough to send me scurrying like a timid little mouse. Which it is, but I straighten my shoulders against the trembling urge to flee.

“I’ll walk with you to breakfast,” he says. After a minute of us just staring at each other, awkward as fuck.

I hesitate too long, so that the moment to refuse passes and we’re out in the hall together anyway. There’s three other people in the lift, two navigators and one fighter, some clubbed together thing of dusty skin and black hair. I don’t recognize either of the navigators, but they all look alike to me anyway, docile and dumb with it like sheep.

His fingers brush mine as the lift whisks us toward the mess hall. So fucking casual about, he’s not even looking at me, but it’s intentional, the way he nudges at me, plucks at me, plays with my hand in a way that sets my heart racing. I almost hate him for it, because we’re not alone now and won’t be at our destination.

I forget about how I’ve spent every meal clung against the junkyard dog, not until I see him looking for me, prowling around the entrance like it’s nothing, like he’s not looking for me, like our eyes don’t meet at once like a bolt of fucking lightning when I come around the corner. And the lion’s right there at my side, and they hate each other, and I know that, because this whole mess started because of a fucked up sense of revenge.

I fake it like we weren’t walking together, like I was just walking, ignoring the sudden twist of anxiety deep against my ribs, ignoring the way my hands begin to shake and a tight, hot, suffocating feeling presses against my chest. I can’t decide if it’s worse to look away from the mad dog or hold his stare with defiance. I can’t decide if I should keep walking forward or turn back before it’s too late.

It’s not even walking, it’s floating, weak-kneed and unable to feel the ground beneath my boots. I walk toward him like nothing happened, like it wasn’t me in that utility closet but someone else, someone sad and stupid, someone for him to fuck while thinking about his navigator. It didn’t happen to me. It didn’t happen at all. That’s the only way I make it over to him without breaking.

He looks surprised to see me and angry about it, angry that I’m making him feel this way with my presence. At the last minute I decide to keep walking, ignoring him, chin lifted and shoulders square. Like I’m not a big fucking mess inside, barely holding it together.

He falls into step beside me without saying a word. We get our trays. The other fighter, the one some stupid, traitorous part of myself wishes was at my side instead, he’s standing not so far behind us in line. I can tell he’s trying not to stare, trying to follow the farce that I’ve created. There are lines of worry on either side of his mouth, like he’s that concerned about the menu, or maybe the slightly-sticky trays that are in need of a second run through the sanitizer.

The dog complains about the food like always, cursing at the dispenser like the fucking machine cares about his opinion. He’s not looking at me anymore, that initial burst of surprise come and gone as the only acknowledgement he wants to make regarding what happened. I’m glad he’s not looking, because my hands are shaking so fucking hard that I slop oatmeal all down the side of my bowl rather than into it.

The meal is torture. I sit there next to him with all the other fighters, and it’s just my nightmare all over again in the worst way. He’s at my side, smelling like smoke and salt, like engine oil, and it’s poison that churns my stomach.

I can’t stop thinking about that supply closet, about the hard rhythm of him behind me, rocking me into the shelves, my face wet against my arm. I can’t even be bothered by the wolf’s dark and mean glare, the scar of his face a beacon of hate in the crowd. Let him hate me, let him glare, I’m full of so much that there isn’t any more room. I’m so empty that it just falls right through. I feel so sick that I can’t eat, that I can’t breathe. I just sit there and let my focus unhinge, my thoughts disconnect, waiting for it to be over so I can leave.


	21. Chapter 21

It’s after PT that he talks to me. We’re both slick with sweat and flushed from exertion, standing around waiting for our turn at the showers. I’m standing just to the side, maybe a little further out of range than normal, because the smell of him is overwhelming, making my skin crawl, my stomach shiver, my heart pound faster in a way that makes me sick. I can’t go too far, can’t leave him entirely, because I’m trapped in his orbit, always and forever, no matter how cruel he becomes, no matter how much it hurts.

His gaze latches on to me with sudden intensity. He tilts his head, gesturing me along, and I follow him willingly toward the relatively quieter area with the lockers. It’s not private, someone could walk in at any second, and I’m so relieved that it cuts deep like shame and something filthy. My heart flies against my ribs like a trapped animal, wild and desperate, like I’d sooner chew my own arm off than stay captive.

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, just stares at me. I refuse to betray how I feel. I look up at him with forced calm, calm so forced it makes me tremble. Finally he scowls, tosses his head, bites out at me, “I didn’t hurt you.”

I lift one shoulder in a lazy shrug, think better of it, and add a sideways smile that’s so brittle it cuts, like something sharp and deadly, like the knife glowing heat against my wrist.

“Tch.” He looks ready to slap me, frustrated and angry that I’m reflecting back at him the unpleasantness he doesn’t want to think about, much less talk about. “So?” he demands. “What the fuck is wrong with you then?”

I shake my head, slow, side to side like an elephant shaking away flies, just another lazy beast under the bright hot sun. There isn’t much mousy about me now except the timid shake of me, cowering beneath his overwhelming pride.

“Don’t give me that. Come on, kiddo. I’m getting tired of this shit.”

I shrug again, because if I open my mouth and work my raspy little whisper I have no idea what might come tumbling, dragged out into the open when it ought to stay down in the deep darkness. If I cry in front of him again I might as slit my throat instead, weep crimson rather than bitter tears, break myself in such a way there aren’t any pieces left to feel.

“Myshonok,” he snaps. It’s almost enough to undo me, the name that he calls me, the name that he gave me, the name that’s his and his alone to use, so that I nearly broke the wet-eyed navigator’s teeth for repeating it that one time.

I shake my head, quick this time, denying him with all my strength.

“You’re acting like a goddamn recruit,” he mutters.

And I know instantly what it means, I hate him for it, I hate myself for it, so intensely that it’s like falling without moving. The ground drops out, there’s a rushing in my ears, a nasty sense of disaster and fear. I drop my eyes at last, the whole of my face downturned in shame and shyness alike, just a timid grey mouse beneath him.

“Look,” he says. All difficult, like choking, practically spitting the words at me from clenched teeth. “That was a hell of a long time ago. I thought you’d be over that by now.”

Even now, with the memory so fresh it stings, with my body echoing his rhythm in vivid reminder, even now I still feel the same for him as I always have, that sense of rapture and desperation, the strength and pain of my devotion.

“Don’t make me say it,” he warns. He’s getting angry with me, frustrated that I won’t just snap out of whatever strangeness it is that disturbs him. He’s so angry with me for making him feel awkward, for ruining things, for not be happy that he got hard thinking about his navigator and stuck it in me like it was some big chore.

I’m breathing in quick, shallow little pants now, barely able to stop myself from crying again. I can’t, not again, not in front of him where he can see. I know he’ll never, ever, forgive me if I cry again. I hold it in, bite the inside my lip until I taste blood, clench my jaw around misery and try to empty my thoughts. I have to be normal for him, normal for us, I have to be what he wants so he’ll let me stay near, so my orbit doesn’t spiral out in the cold vast of space.

“Hey.” He snaps his fingers under my nose. “Look at me.”

I shudder, bite my lip harder, nostrils flaring the effort of keeping it together. Still keep looking at the ground, because if I look at him I’ll be lost.

“Aleks,” he hisses. “Aleks, fucking look at me when I’m talking to you. This is important.”

So I do, because Sacha has asked me to, and I denying him would like denying air. I lift my face to him, tipped forward like maybe we’ll kiss, because I don’t know when to stop.

There’s something like kindness in his expression, the soft, angry twist of his mouth, the dark swept-down line of his brows, and the bright gleam of his dark eyes. My Sacha, not the fighter they turned him into, the mad dog, the junkyard brawler, no, he’s just my Sacha now the skinny pup who curled against me in a skinny bunk when we were just goddamn new recruits. I whimper like having gotten kicked, torn up inside by just the way he’s looking at me, shattering over and over again because I just can’t fucking stop.

He looks me in the eye, gives me the sort of smile you give broken, dying things, and says gently, “I didn’t fuck you because I’m love with you. I fucked you because you needed it.”

And the worst is how nice he sounds about it, how genuine he sounds about it, like someone ought to walk up and give a gold fucking star for being the best friend ever because he knows I must have gone looking for the wolf in the first place, he knows how I earned those bottles of contraband liquor. He knows I’m just a slut on my knees begging for it hard and rough, because if I let them do it hard it doesn’t feel like a fight, it doesn’t feel like I’ve lost if I let them, tell myself it’s what I wanted.

His arm goes around me, rough, jerking, violent with affection as he draws me against him. Shakes me, so it doesn’t seem so much like a hug, then throws me off him before I can react. “Better me than some asshole who’s just going to beat you during it.”

I nod, stiff, wooden, like a puppet on strings.

He looks at me sideways, crosses his arm, acts like a sulking kid about it for a moment. “So I don’t want to see you showing up with anymore bruises. Come to me first, okay?”

I nod again. I’d agree to anything to make this stop. I know, deep within me, I know that if he offers again, if he takes me to utility closet, some out of the way area, tell me to take off my pants and bend against some shelves, I will. I can’t help it. I can’t help myself. I can only nod and hope he leaves the offer here, implied rather than explicit.

“And don’t let Abel know, you fucking hear me?”

Always about the navigator, the one whose name he called me, whose endearments he whispered to me, the one he thought about to get aroused enough to fuck a scratchy-voiced, broken up, scrawny, dusky-skinned bastard, just some unwanted, used up whore bent over for him.

“Well. Good,” he snarls. He cuffs me across the shoulder, affectionate in that way of his, back to being awkward again, some growling mad dog, another lean and mean fighter in uniform. He turns away, wanting to see if the showers have opened up again, but I hang back. Turn aside at the last minute, slip away unseen, or maybe he sees and lets me go, but I can’t stay a single heartbeat longer and still have a heart, so it’s for the best he doesn’t call me back.

 

 


	22. Chapter 22

It isn’t easy to get a navigator alone when he isn’t yours. They rove together in packs through the halls, into the lab, at meals, branching off with their fighters for sims and calibrations. It takes until just after dinner, when I spot him sitting beside the other navigator, the one with the scar, the one that gets called _sweetheart_ and _princess_ with such rapturous praise.

I get him alone by snagging his arm at the elbow, dragging him aside, and it startles him. He’s got round-eyed terror for a moment before he recognizes me, because I could be any fighter, a dog or a wolf or a fearsome beast, rather than a harmless grey mouse.

“Deimos! Hello.” He smiles, sweet like cream, half-hugs himself with his arms.

“Tonight,” I tell him. No preamble, because he knows exactly what I mean, I can see it in the way his eyes widen, his breath sucks in and holds there, trapped between the slight bite of his lower lip.

“Tonight?” he repeats, stunned, terrified, but starting to get over it, starting to find his steel beneath all the fluff.

I nod, just the once, firm and resolute.

The held breath rushes out of him. “Okay,” he says. “Now?”

I shake my head. If we’re going to do this stupid plan, there’s something I need to do first. He nods as we quickly outline when and where to meet.

“Okay,” he said again. His smile trembles, unsteady at the corners, because he’s scared. I know he won’t change his mind, he’s got a lot more motive than I do, so maybe he’s afraid I’ll change my mind, that I won’t show up despite giving my word.

I squeeze his arm, release it, giving him a promise with the gesture. The corners straighten out of his smile so he looks somber, hopeful. I nod again and turn to leave. If we’re going to do this stupid plan, I have a last kiss to give. 


	23. Chapter 23

I don’t know why I thought it would be easy. My nerve almost drops out with my stomach when the door opens and I see him standing there, cream-colored, wet-eyed, the line of his scar so vivid it hurts. I don’t know why I thought it would be easy.

“Hello?” he asks, confused and wary. He doesn’t trust me, maybe doesn’t like me, maybe doesn’t know a goddamn thing except how to suck cock and fly.

“Letting all the cold air in, princess,” calls the fighter. Drowsy, lazy like he’s just gotten a good fucking, and now I can see the pinked flush over the navigator’s cheeks, the tousle of his hair, the fresh-sucked pert of his mouth.

Heat rushes through my arteries and ice through my veins, and the tight clench of my heart is suffocating, terrible and claustrophobic. I square my shoulders, lift my chin, hate the fact that this stupid wet-eyed navigator isn’t shorter than me so I can look down my nose at him. I won’t let him see how I’m shaking.

The navigator frowns at me, unhappy about the fact I exist, that I’ve shown up at their door, and shifts aside somewhat. “Cain,” is all he says, calling like for the dog that he is, and the fighter gets to his feet from the bed. They don’t have bunks, just the mattresses pushed together, and it’s a fucking knife to the gut when I notice.

“Oh for fuck’s—“ the fighter starts to rumble, changes his mind about it, saunters up to the door and sets the most casual and possessive sling of his arm around the little blond navigator’s shoulder. “What do you want?” he snarls at me.

I shrug, and we both know why. His brow tightens so severely it looks painful, glaring at me like if he wills it hard enough I’ll go away.

The fighter steps around the navigator into the hall, moving slow about it, dragging out the brush of their bodies so that the stupid little blond blushes and drops his eyes to the floor. “Don’t go anywhere, sweetheart.” He purrs it, soothes it out like velvet, and it’s daggers into my heart, needles into my lungs, so that I’m dizzy with the hurt of it all.

Still, I favor the navigator with a glint-edge smile, something sharp like my knives, holding his curious stare as I take his fighter away from him. It’s all I have when he has all the rest, but it’s mine and it’s precious, the way that the mad dog falls into step beside the little mouse, his gravity once again pulling and pushing at me like moon tide.

The profanity he mutters under his breath is crude, disjointed, a jumble of languages, harsh and beautiful like a lullaby. His voice lifts into a hiss as we get further away, to where the little navigator we’ve left behind couldn’t possibly hear. “Don’t ever come to my room like that again,” he says. “Not when Abel’s there.”

I shrug, like it doesn’t matter, like my heart’s not racing, my palms aren’t slicked with sweat, like I’m not terrified and shaking. I want him mad at me, I want to keep his focus on me, to hate me if he can’t love me. I want his passion and his terror, I want to be week-kneed and shaking for him, something he can bully around and use and call it kindness, if that’s what how he has to do this. I just want all this hurt and confusion to go away. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I want to forget the nightmare.

He grabs my arm at the elbow and jerks me to the side, slams me up against the wall. I look up at him with bright-eyed, blazing eagerness, so taut it’s like piano wire ready to snap, trembling with everything that’s churning around behind the blank force of my stare. He’s furious, wild with it, a mad dog that I’m going to push too far over the edge so he’ll take me down with him. The thought makes me smile.

The change in my expression silences him before he can get started yelling at me. I can see the angry words choke down his throat in a long, bobbing swallow. He just scowls instead, frustrated that I’m making things awkward again. “Fine,” he says. “Is your stupid face navigator around?”

I shake my head, because he’s out drinking again with his friend, the crest-haired navigator who’s built like a fighter but much too smart and pale, cream-colored even if he isn’t docile. The dog nods, shoves me toward my dorm.

I’ve always known before when to stop pushing him, when to fall when he pushes back, how to keep within the boundaries he’s established while still fluttering against them like a moth circling a light, too stupid to know if it gets close it’ll die, too confused and trapped to know which way is out, so in love with the very thing that’s got it held captive to want out. Tonight’s the night I push him too far, because I know he won’t kill me, and I have nothing else to lose.

He swears under his breath again, keeping a tight hold on my arm like maybe I’ll bolt, which is stupid considering I’m the one forcing him into this. For just a moment I start to think dangerous doubts, and my fingers tremble over the keypad enough that I flub the passcode and have to try it again.

I haven’t gotten the door open yet when the loud tread of a fighter’s boot against the floor comes around the corner, hesitates like he’s seen us, and then quickens. I drop my hand from the panel and keep my head down, trembling, because I’ve a pretty good guess who it is by the length and speed of the stride.

“What the fuck do you want, Praxis?” growls the dog. He’s looking for a fight, thinking this is over the wet-eyed navigator he’s left behind and probably still thinking about so he can get ready to fuck me like he promised, because it’s what I need, because I’m so fucked up and scared that I hate myself for it.

The reply is quiet and refined, hushed up like he’s some navigator, “I needed to see Deimos for a minute.” He’s being oddly complacent about it, almost bored, speaking submissively like he needs the dog’s permission just to talk to the mouse.

“He’s busy. Get lost.” His hand tightens over my elbow. He’s not going to let me go without a fight, because it’s a challenge now, prodding deep at that possessive streak that powers all the stubborn pride that keeps me in his orbit.

“It’s about the sim he and Phobos ran this afternoon.”

“So? What the fuck do I care?”

“It won’t take long.”

“Go ask Phobos about it.”

“It’s a fighter thing.”

One deep breath in, let it out shaky, do it again until I realize it’s a lost cause. I bite my lip instead, hard so that nerves jump and pain sings along the break my teeth into the skin. Slowly I shrug my arm out of his grip. He lets me go, because this is my choice after all, and I fucking hate him for it. I want him to fight for me, I want to be more than just stubborn pride, something he owns and knows it, takes it for granted. I just want him to feel something for me, even if it’s hate, even if it’s just for one night. I’ll never have another night like this, so desperate and absolute.

But I shake his hand off my arm, and he knows what that means. He knows me better than anyone, better than I know myself. I edge away from the door panel and somehow figure out how to look at him without breaking. He’s frowning at me, maybe a little concerned, definitely angry, so frustrated and awkward that my heart twitches and stutters like a dying thing, some stupid prey in a predator’s jaws.

I brush the back of my knuckles against his, dismissing him, telling him to go back to the little navigator with the scar, the one he wants to be with and would break my teeth in to hear me tell him what a love-struck fool of a pup he’s become.

His dark eyes narrow, like he can’t figure me out, like maybe he knows what I’ve got shoved up within the locked confines of my silence, like if he glares hard enough I’ll admit that I don’t want him to go. But he doesn’t want to stay, he just feels a sense of duty, something possessive that hurts me all the deeper because he’s trying to help. He thinks I’m just a slut on my knees, so desperate for it that I’ll go looking to lose a fight unless he grits his teeth and fucks me, like it’s some goddamn chore.

He looks between me and the other fighter, the one with the eye patch, the one he hates because he’s so possessive of his slutty little navigator with the pert, pink, scarred mouth. Maybe he knows it’s a lie, that no one would give two shits about my low-ranked simulation run, or maybe he just thinks we’re both so beneath where he is at the top that it doesn’t matter. When he looks back at me, opens his mouth to say something, I move quick, urgent, before anything can change.

I tangle my hand in his shaggy dark hair, coarse between my fingers. Pull him down to me at the same time I lift on to my toes, press myself to him, breathe in the burn and salt smell of him, like a fire on the beach even though I’ve never seen the ocean.

I don’t want to think about what it means that I’m less clumsy at this now, I know how to keep my nose from smashing his, that my mouth parts easily and little noises bubble out of me; it’s different than the first kiss, this last one I give him, and yet all the same. He tastes the same as I remember, and for a brilliant half-heartbeat he’s too surprised to fight me, so I just cling to him, kissing him, and it’s almost like I can pretend he’s kissing me back, like this is what should have happened in that cramped utility closet.  

And then he reacts, pushing back because I’ve pushed too hard, shoving at me with reactionary violence. And I fall, just like always, banging off the wall and crumpling to the floor in an untidy little lump that shakes and shivers because everything’s crashing down, it was poorly stacked together anyway.

One set of boots falters forward, the other retreats with calm, collected steps, so fucking full of pride it hurts. I don’t hear either of them say anything, and I keep my head down, flinching and timid, not caring how it looks. I’ve fucked it all up now, there’s no way I haven’t, because he told me himself, told me he wants to be the only one I’m with, so he’s got to be furious knowing what a cheap dumb whore I am.

“Get up,” he says, once we’re alone. There’s nothing gentle in words or the way he spits them at me.

I drag myself to my feet, head down and defeated, waiting for the blows to start falling.

“Open the door,” he says. Tense, tight, wound up like he’s going to snap once we’re on the other side of the door, where it’s private.

I look at the panel. It takes a long time to remember the code, because my thoughts are so scattered and disjointed it hurts to think. He shoves at me, not exactly rough, not necessarily kind, just getting me through the door as soon as it opens.

And then we’re truly alone, just the arrangement of cramped bunks and the dresser, same as every other dorm on the Sleipnir. I stare at the top of my boots rather than risk looking at him. He has to hate me now, has to be disgusted with me, fed up and angry about it.

 “Why did you lie to me?” he asks. Grit-teeth, snarling, the lion not so lazy under the hot sun but riled up for a fight, pacing in its cage, vicious and awe-inspiring like the king of the beasts.

It’s not exactly the question I’m expecting. I glance up at him, startled, and the intensity of his lopsided dark gaze is overwhelming. I shrug and look away, quickly, so nervous and scared I could scream.

“Deimos. What was that just now?”

I shrug, which is the wrong thing to do and I know it, I know it before, during, and after the gesture. He wants me to talk to him, he’s not a mind reader, he wants to hear from my mouth that I’m just a stupid slutty mouse – his hands find me, grip my shoulders, shaking at me like he can tear the words from my throat. My heart beats so hard and fast, until I think my ribs must be bruising, the bones cracking, it hurts so much with him shaking me, so angry, not gentle at all, just strong and bruising.

“Why would you do that?” He shakes me all the harder, and it’s a rough rhythm, like getting pressed into a set of shelves in a cramped utility closet, the same back and forth motion that’s got me trapped. “Why would you kiss him?”

And it’s everything, hard and fast, rocking, shaking, the hot-cold claustrophobic sense of things, my heart breaking, his hands bruising, the snarl of his questions and the pain of them, the way his voice is unsteady despite the clench of his teeth, like I’ve hurt him somewhere deep inside so now he has to hurt me. Hard and fast, rocking me, shaking, just like my nightmare so that I panic, start to fight back, violent and frantic like a cat dropped in water.

He doesn’t let me go, just tightens his grip, because he is so much stronger than me and he knows it. Things tip toward ugly the more I panic, and it isn’t still I start making some terrible fractured whimper out of the ruin of my throat that he lets me go. Pushes me away, throwing me away, so that I stumble and nearly fall. I reel around, catching my balance at the last possible moment.

“I thought you didn’t want him!” He’s yelling because he can, because his throat isn’t ruined, no one held him down until his fingers and toes went numb, chest tight, red and black starbursts, kicking at the floor and clawing so that afterward there’s dead skin under my nails, hearing the crack of something break, the thin whistle of my last breath, the terror and pain and sick desperation.

When I still don’t say anything, he growls and says, “I thought you wanted me.”

Just quiet between us now, almost silence if not for the deep harshness of his breathing and the short, shallow panting of mine. I’ve got one arm hugged to my chest, the other dangling, trying to hold in some of the hurt without much success. I’m shaking so terrible, head to toe, barely upright and finding it impossible to stay focused on anything longer than a few fleeting seconds. My attention just touches over things like birds scattering for dropped crumbs. 

“Deimos,” he says at last. Softer now, more frustrated than angry, sounding sad about it like I’ve hurt him with my silence. “Please talk to me. I can’t understand otherwise.” He pauses, hesitates into the stretching qualm, sighs, says, “I’m sorry for yelling.”

I turn my head away, hiding my face behind the fall of my bangs. I’m not sure I want him to understand, but it’s reached a point where I’m trapped. He’ll hate me for the truth just as much as he’ll hate me for a lie, for whatever assumption he can pull together from what he saw. I realize that he only interfered because he thought the mad dog was forcing me, that controlling hand of his on my elbow, dragging me somewhere to bend me against the shelves and—

He’s gotten close to me again, I wasn’t paying enough attention. His hand finds my shoulder and I jolt like an electric shock, so violently that he snatches his hand away as of he also got struck by lightning. “Deimos,” he says slowly, because he’s back to being gentle, trying to make this someone else’s fault so I’m just some stupid broken slut again. “Tell me what happened.”

I look up at him. He’s not so angry anymore, just frustrated and concerned, already working on a way to absolve me of guilt. He wants to believe in me so desperately it makes him dumb. It’s not really thought, just action, putting my arms around his neck and stretching up on my toes, kissing him—

He knocks me back, rougher than maybe he intended, judging by the quick way he catches my arm so I won’t stumble. Irritation wrinkles over his brow and disappears into the dark swath of the patch. “Stop it, Deimos.”

When I slip close to him again he lets me, stays tense, eyeing me warily like I’m going to bite. I reach a hand toward him, thread my fingers into the silk-dark mane of his hair, gently lower his ear toward my mouth so I can whisper. “I do want you.”

He shudders beneath me, the dry rasp of my voice accidentally becoming something tantalizing. I keep my fingers in his hair, curled against the back of his neck, pleading at him with the gesture. I think maybe he understands now, even if I don’t understand it myself, and sway my lips toward his again to kiss.

He pulls away, straightening so that his height separates us. He stares down at me, so that I feel like a lowly, cringing mouse once more, timid and grey, ugly and unwanted. “I’m not going to have sex with you,” he says. It’s cruel, the way he says it, sneering and disgusted, frustrated, almost angry again.

And then he’s soft, gentle like I don’t understand, capturing my little hand in his big one, holding it to his chest. “That’s not the way I mean it. I don’t just want you for sex, for your body. I want you here, for this.” He shifts our clasped hands to my ribs, right up against the place where my pulse beats the strongest. “Do you understand? I like you, that’s why I want to be with you. That’s why you matter to me.”

He doesn’t say he loves me, which is what shocks me the most, because it means he’s being sincere, that he’s treating me, this, us, seriously. And he’s so earnest, looking down at me, so hurt because I’ve been an idiot and tried to wreck everything before it could get taken from me, like if I broke it myself it wouldn’t hurt to lose it. I drop my gaze, ashamed, humiliated, so fucking sorry and scared that it hurts, that I’m confused somewhere deep inside in a place that’s hollow but maybe starting to fill.

I swallow, and it’s lumpy, wet, tremulous in a way that frightens me. I shrug, slow, less dismissive than before, more like hunching myself against a fight. I bend toward him slowly, wanting his arms around me, and he lets me. Folds me to his chest, wraps his arms over my back, gives me all that gentleness I’m nowhere near deserving.

I tip onto my toes, nudge my nose into his neck, nuzzling at him to speak, but when I open my mouth there aren’t any words. I almost cry instead, my vision wavering over into stinging liquid. I tuck my face into the crook of his shoulder to hide, to bite my lip and quell all the stupid, self-destructive fear back down inside me.

He rubs apology and comfort into my back, being sweet to me, gentle with his big hands and strong arms, and it just makes me more miserable because I was going to throw it all away, because he’s probably reassured himself with some lie about what he saw. He wants to believe in me so desperately the truth hurts, and I can’t escape it.

It comes out of me in a scratchy whisper not because it has to but because the words are thick and choking. “Like you, too.” There’s more to it than that, and he knows it from the way I tremble, press closer to him, swallow so loud that surely he hears it. “Love Sacha more.”

So now he can hate me for it, but I won’t have to be a liar. Maybe if I can get him to understand it, he’ll help me understand it as well. His hands tighten over me, almost hard enough to bruise, before he backs away, lowers me off him, still holding me but wanting to look at me, stare at me with a terrible sucker-punch expression.

“Who is Sacha?”

I hesitate. I hadn’t meant to use the wrong name. I’m trying to look everywhere but at him, skin crawling, terrified, wound up so tight that I’m vibrating in his hands. “Cain.”

“You’re in love with Cain.” The way he says it is so flat I could slide it under the door like a welcome mat.

I jerk my head up and down in a helpless nod.

And then he doesn’t say anything, and it’s a terrible silence. I close my eyes so I don’t have to look at him, try not to think about anything. I’m almost swaying in his hold, dizzying with grief, stuck between remembering a rocking, tear-stained rhythm and slow, plunging intimacy of kissing that morning, how it made me feel hot and shivery. My orbit wobbles on the axis between them, the two fighters, the dog and the lion, the clash of gravity creating earthquakes and tidal flooding, cataclysmic destruction.

“Is that why you let him have sex with you?”

I nod.

“And why you’ll let him again, if though you don’t want to?”

I hesitate, because it isn’t honest, it’s an assumption, but I remember the cramped utility closet and the harsh way he shoved me against the door just now when I tried to kiss him, and I’m so dizzy and swaying with the memory that I might puke. I don’t know what I want anymore.

“Deimos—“ He stops. He speaks slow, quietly, trying to flatten out his words so they won’t cut me. “Are you going to let him have sex with you again?”

I lift one shoulder and then let it fall. _I don’t know._

He sets a hand against the back of my neck, and I flinch, thinking surely I’ve made him so angry he’ll throttle me for it, shake me into bruises again, keep shaking until he’s put an end to my stupidity. I can’t see his expression, because my eyes are still closed. I open them slowly to find him staring at me, puzzled, worried, brow tight with anger, but I don’t think he’s mad at me.  I almost wish he would be mad at me again, so it’d be easier.

He rubs at the trembling tension in my shoulders. It’s almost pitying, the look he gives me, and I drop my gaze with red-hot shame. “Okay,” he says quietly. “I understand.”

I want him to explain it to me, but he doesn’t. He just pulls me close again, sighs, keeps holding me, stroking my hair, petting at the shaking line of my spine. He is so gentle, and it isn’t fucking fair.

 


	24. Chapter 24

I’m starting to get a cramp in my right calf, because it’s fucking uncomfortable wedged between the coils and piping of the maintenance passage. I don’t dare do more than just try flexing it out, because we spent a lot of time getting my position perfect. I’m just another dip of shadow, obscured and hidden but with a clear line of sight on the trembling little navigator who shines like a beacon in his white uniform, cream-colored and fragile, terrified and looking it. I’m not sure how much he’s acting and how much he’s sincere, exposed like he is, fucking lamb for the slaughter.

He’s smart enough not to look toward my position, not even when the sound of a fighter’s boots echoes down into the gloom with ominous purpose. This is his stupid fucking plan, because navigators are supposed to be smart, crammed full of logic and numbers, skilled in thinking unlike the bulked brutality of the fighters. And that’s me, I’m the brutality, hiding in the shadows with a knife clenched in my palm.

The little lamb turns a round-eyed stare down the narrow corridor, searching the darkness. I can see the way he brings his lower lip under his teeth, biting it, either scared or just acting like it. He was so worried when I turned up late, not by a lot, but late all the same, and enough that he mistook the sound of my boots and nearly bolted in a panic. He doesn’t want to face what’s coming alone. I adjust my grip on the knife and wait.

The wolf stalks out of the shadows and into the sickly pale light from the runners along the walkway. Scarred black muzzle, gleaming dark eyes, sneering a cruel, teasing smile at the sight of the fearful little lamb.

The navigator straightens, squares his shoulders, tries not to look so small and round-eyed, round-faced, sweet like cream and pale in his milk-white uniform. I can’t tell if the backward step is intentional, drawing the wolf’s predatory instincts, or if he’s bracing himself not to run. His eyes never waver over to where I’m hidden, he knows better than to ruin our only advantage. Even together, a lamb and a mouse aren’t much against a wolf.

“Hello, cutie,” says the fighter. He stalks closer, almost circling, making the navigator rotate in place to face him.

“Logos,” he says. Not hi or hello, not smiling, big-eyed and mouth flat, trying to look stern but mostly just looking so scared it’s tragic.

“Nice place you picked for a talk.” The wolf doesn’t take his eyes away from his prey, but my skin crawls like he’s looking straight at me. My palms begin to sweat. It’s warm down here, so close to the engines, the air poorly filtered and barely tolerable. I hardly dare to breathe, much less move, willing myself to be just another shadow. No one notices a small grey mouse.

“I knew you wouldn’t come otherwise,” says the lamb.

“Heh.” The fighter circles him again, tighter, brushing up against him and running black hand up the white line of the navigator’s uniform, all the way up into the pale curls. He fists his hand there, hard enough that the little blond winces. “You’re so sweet to think of me.”

A swallow bobs through his throat, and the words tremble out around fearful shaking. “You said we could talk. Just talk, Logos.”

“Uh-huh.” He pulls tighter, forcing the navigator to lift on to his toes to mitigate the pain.  He lets go only when the lamb starts making noise, small whimpers, begging without words. “So, talk.”

“I just—“ It breaks off into a gasp as the fist tightens further. “You have to leave me alone. I’m not yours anymore.”

“Have to?” The wolf snarls, shakes him, lets go of his hair and slaps him, hard enough to hurt, soft enough for it to be an insult.

The navigator rubs at the red mark on his cheek. He puffs up with a brave front that’s about as strong as a house of cards. “Yes. I – I’ll report you.”

The wolf laughs. It’s abrupt, harsh, shiver-inducing. “Report me?” He hits him again, harder this time, hard enough that my hand shakes with the urge to ruin everything and break from the plan. “Because you’re not mine anymore?”

“Y-yes,” says the lamb, like he’s too stupid to understand the warning in the question, like he’s going to be brave about this despite the way he’s trembling, despite the slow trickle of blood from his nose. Because it’s part of the fucking plan.

The wolf laughs again, it’s like barking, and then puts the iron bar of his arm around the little blond, pulls him close in a mockery of affection. “Oh, cutie. You’ll always be mine.”

“Let me go,” says the navigator. It’s the wrong thing to say entirely, which makes it all the harder for me to watch. I know he’s saying the wrong things, provoking the fighter, making himself a juicy target, a little lamb for the slaughter. And I can’t fucking watch anymore than I can look away, because I’m the one with the knife, I’m the one who has to do this.

The navigator tries to lean away, tries to push away, and the wolf looms over him until they’re almost bent double, like dancers in a sway, and all the while he’s chuckling, snarling, amused by the fight he’s getting. He pulls them both upright and spins the navigator into the coils and panels, throwing him and then pinning him there, back to me.

Which means I can see the round-eyed fear in the navigator’s face as he gets trapped. He fights more, slow about it, careful, because he doesn’t want to get hurt even though it’s part of the plan, it’s just as risky as the rest of it. I never should have agreed to this, because I’m suddenly certain with absolute dread that I won’t be able to watch much longer.

The wolf’s cruel about it, teasing, enjoying the way he can overpower the much smaller, docile, round-faced little navigator. He growls hateful things that get eaten into the dull and distant roar of the engines.

“Logos, stop.” He’s rushing air in and out, starting to panic, and I can’t tell if he’s pretending or if he’s starting to forget the plan, if he’s so afraid he’s forgotten that I’m here, I’m waiting, that I’ll stop the wolf when the time is right.

His eyes scrunch shut. “Stop!” Like it’s going to make a difference,.

The wolf cracks him across the jaw for it. The lamb slumps, dazed, rendered meek and docile like a navigator should be as the fighter paws at him, jerks open the front of his uniform, kisses and bites at the pink circles in a pale chest.

He’s taking his time, and I fucking hate him for it so much that I feel sick, stomach churning, shaky. I have to calm down, keep the knife steady. The navigator has to fight to keep him interested, that’s the worst part, we both knew that coming down here, coming up with the plan.

The navigator shakes free of the daze, groggy but starting to struggle again. The wolf has to kick at him, wedge his knee in between the small press of the navigator’s thighs, force them apart and keep them spread. The worst is when he folds his mouth over him, kisses him, brutalizing him like it’s affection, until small, shivering cries echo all around the maintenance passage.

The wolf holds him to the wall with one hand gripped tight over the lamb’s wrists and pulls back, fumbling at his belt, shoving his pants free of the bulging erection; he likes the way the navigator cringes from him, whimpers at him, jerks and struggles with all his feeble strength.

“Please,” the navigator says. I wish he wouldn’t beg. I can’t fucking stand it if he begs. He has to, because that’s what the wolf wants, but I’m losing track of what is and isn’t part of the plan. I don’t know why I thought this would be easy, or at least not this goddamn impossibly hard, and I’m the bastard hiding in the shadows, not the poor fucking lamb offered up for the slaughter.

“Please, Logos, don’t do this. I’ll – I won’t report you. I’m sorry.”

The wolf sneers, doesn’t say anything, just strikes him across the face until there’s blood dripping onto the white uniform and pale chest. He shoves the lamb down, to his knees, fists a hand into the blond curls to hold him upright. Because the motherfucker knows the lamb is too timid to bite back, he slaps and rubs his cock into the navigator’s bloody face, poking around to humiliate him rather than just get to it.

My stomach flips and twists into an impossible knot, because this isn’t how it’s suppose to go, this isn’t the way I need him to be, and there’s no way I can just hide here and watch. But if I go now, if I try for it this way, it’s risky. I hesitate, heft the knife into a tighter grip, try not to watch even though I’m staring right at it. Try not to hear the wet, gagging sound as the wolf stops fucking around and makes the navigator swallow. I try not to hate myself for waiting, watching.

He pumps at him fast, deep, hard, choking, the sound is awful. Just when I’m ready to throw caution to the wind and get myself killed so I don’t have to listen to the wretchedness any longer, the wolf throws the navigator to the floor. He coughs and chokes, gagging, spitting blood, making some pathetic sound that’s too dry to be sobs and too erratic to be breathing.

The wolf strokes himself, smearing blood over his throbbing cock, and I’m almost glad when he picks the navigator up and presses him face-first into the wall. It won’t be long now. I wish I could tell the lamb that, I wish I didn’t have to be here for this, I wish I didn’t know exactly how all that fucking sympathy got put into the little lamb’s face when he found a battered little mouse.

One last struggle, this one purely mechanical as the navigator’s belt clasp snags, and then pushing, grunting, brutally familiar rhythm, like it’s some goddamn race. And then I’m out from the shadows, because he’s not looking at me, he’s not thinking about me, he’s buried in some poor fucking lamb who is braver than a lot of other beasts.

He’s too tall for me to get his throat, not without ruining the surprise. If they weren’t upright against the wall, maybe. I creep forward, barefoot so there’s not even my boots to make a sound, eyes on the target, trying to ignore the slap of flesh and the terribly soft whimpering noises that are still loud enough to rise above the drone of the engines.

Maybe he sees me, maybe he’s just lucky, maybe he just wants to change the angle. Whatever the reason, when I lunge toward him, throwing myself against his back, there’s a fractional shift from the target to where I actually sink the knife. I get it in deep, thrusting into him just as hard as he’s thrusting into the navigator, hot blood flowing over my knuckles, the metal sinking in with a satisfying whisper. I’ve got him in the soft, fleshy flank, just below the ribs, just above the hip.

Chaos follows, because it isn’t like I can get his throat and put him down quick, and now he sure as fuck knows I’m there, and he’s bleeding dark, thick, copious amounts of blood but not enough, not near enough. I pull the knife out and hesitate too long, torn between moving out of range or making a second stab, so by the time I bring my arm forward to strike again, he’s ready to fight me.

The navigator falls boneless to the floor when the fighter lets him go, slips free of him, something almost comical in the fact he’s coming after me with his pants sagging low and cock wagging. I don’t have time to look at the navigator, to see if he’s okay, because clearly he fucking isn’t and the only thing I can do about it is kill the goddamn wolf for him like I said I would.

I swipe and get lucky, shred a long red smile into his forearm. It forces him back, stumbling right over the bloodstained white puddle of the navigator. He snarls at me, “Fucking slut” like I give a shit about what waste of breath he wants to calls me.

I step over and around the navigator, pursuing the fighter as he tries to retreat. It’s best I get between the wolf and the lamb anyway, to keep the little blond safe, because he did his part of the goddamn stupid reckless fucked up plan. I am shaking with rage, bright-eyed with it, making the darkness glow and the air hum. Shaking, but the knife is steady, my steps sure. My lips pull into a feral, teeth-bared grin. I’m going to kill him.

He reaches behind himself, hoisting up his pants and pulling a knife of his own free with the gesture. I must have accidentally taught him a trick or two about not always relying on strength. We’ve both got teeth now, but he’s bloody and I’ve only got his blood on me, I might be stronger now, not so weak, I’m the one advancing and making him retreat further down the maintenance passage, away from the navigator, because I won’t let him get hurt anymore.

The corridor widens just enough that he can move sideways on me, forcing me to hold my ground rather than circle and expose the length of passageway behind me. We trade swipes, little tests of range and agility, sizing up the situation. I advance, quick, aggressive, surprising him with speed and recklessness, so that I get through his reach unscathed. I get him deep again, throwing my weight behind it, stabbing rather than slashing because I need this to end, I need him to bleed.

Blade strikes bone, crunching into his ribs, sending a shock of vibration up my arm. I pull out, thrust in again, stabbing, not bothering to get out of range because it doesn’t fucking matter, I just have to end this, kill him—

I barely feel it as pain, just something cold and then rushing warmth, my side punctured open with the way he punches a knife-clenched fist into me, brutal and without finesse. He has no idea where to aim, but it doesn’t matter when we’re pressed this close together. I waste time knocking his blade away, getting an arm between us, swatting at him rather than stabbing. I’ve got to get back, I can’t stay within his reach like this, I’m just a little mouse, quick and agile.

He catches me with a bellowing assault, no finesse to it at all, just fists and anger, wild strength. Things shimmer, go sideways, my ears ringing, I’m trying to move back because I’ve got him good enough now, I just need to tire him out, let the blood flow. If I retreat too far I’ll run into the little navigator again, and if he’s still just a shivering puddle of bloodstained white I’m fucking trapped, because I can’t just leave him here. I’ve got to keep the wolf on me, that was how the plan worked, I’m a fighter same as him, I’m a fighter who’s got to win.

I put a hand over the wound in my side. It’s deep, but I don’t think he hit anything vital. I don’t think it’ll kill me. I don’t know if I got anything vital on him either, but there’s a lot of blood and a lot more still coming, and how the fuck is he still coming toward me with murder in his eyes? I ought to be the one looking like that, I ought to—

Some fucking stretch of wire and piping, right up against my ankles, tripping me into a stumble that gives him an opening, lets him knock me down. We’re both down, his harsh breathing falling over me, his warm blood everywhere, I have no fucking clue where either of our knives have gone. He’s done playing, he’s not going to let it last long because he doesn’t have long, I’ve ripped him open with my claws. His hands close over my throat and squeeze.

 _Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck_ — I’m struggling, panicking, fighting at him, kicking and shrieking until the rasped, hoarse, ugly cries turn into whimpers, his hands tightening, throttling, shaking me in his jaws. Everything’s going dark, fuzzy, red and black flashes, my bare feet catching on the metal floor, my nails scratching useless rivulets into the tight constriction of his hands. The whimpering gets louder, fractures, turns into thin whistling and then silence. One bursting beat of my heart, and then another, I’m going to count them until they stop, because I’m going to die this way, clenched into his jaws, but maybe he’ll bleed to death before he can crawl to medical, maybe—


	25. Chapter 25

Lungs hitching, breath rushing, it hurts so fucking much, I’m choking on nothing, desperate, painful, and all the horrible noises I’m making now that I can breathe. I roll to my side, curl my knees toward my chest, suck hollow agony with short, struggling gasps, until the suffering lessens.  I’m still wheezing, woozy, pain throbbing and flaring along my throat, but I’m alive. It hurts too much for anything less.

I pick myself up slowly, aware of the fact I’m not alone but it’s eerily quiet other than the whistling effort of my breathing. There’s the little navigator, curled around his knees, face hidden, rocking himself slightly, not making a sound. He’s got my knife clenched in one fist, so I don’t dare touch him without first putting the rest of it together. The wolf’s on my other side, face-down where someone rolled him off me, very still and so clearly dead. The stupid fucking plan worked. We’re both alive, and he’s not.

I swallow, it’s torture. There’s a deep ache in my side, and I press my hand into the wetness. Blood flows over my fingers. It’s not enough to kill me, I think.

“Is he dead?” whispers the navigator. He lifts a tear-streaked face from the press of his knees. He looks a mess, bloodied and beaten, but I think it might not be so bad once he cleans up. His nose doesn’t look broken, the swelled skin across his cheek is tender but not busted. His eyes are dry now, but no telling how long he sat there sobbing while I choked and heaved with suffocated misery.

I look at the fighter, reach for him. The navigator whines, terrified, so I don’t turn the body over. I prod the cold silence of his neck without really looking, so that I find the torn mess the knife made of his throat, fingers slipping into wet gore. I jerk my hand back quickly, and nod. He’s pretty damn dead, thanks to us.

A sigh falls out of the navigator, broken and trembling, so it’s more like a shuddering sob than anything. I glance at the knife he’s still got in a white-knuckle grip. He seems to realize that as well and lets go, recoiling from the weapon, starting to panic as the full weight of it sinks in. He’s never killed anyone before, that’s why he asked me to help. I was supposed to kill the wolf for him.

Little sounds escape him, skin-crawling denial as he stares at the dead fighter. I move slow, so fucking slow, because the last thing I need is to fuck this up. He lets me put a hand on him, lets me pull him out of his tight huddled ball, lets me pat at the soft blond curls. I set his face into my shoulder so he won’t have to look. I can’t say anything, not with the ruined way I can barely breathe, he has to understand the press of my body against his to act as comfort, apology, absolution and gratitude.

He cries a little, I’m not sure why. There’s a lot that needs crying over, but I don’t feel anything other than a numb sense of relief. It’s probably shock. Blood still wells against the press of my hand against my side, but it’s slowing, trickling, started to clot the longer I sit.

Except it isn’t over yet. There’s more left to the stupid fucking plan. I wait for him to sniffle, hiccup, and fall silent, burrowed into me and trembling, so that I feel like a huge bully and an asshole for pushing him away. I try to be gentle about it, shrugging him off more than anything else, trying to gesture like it’s a stupid game of charades. He just stares at me, round-eyed, paler than the moon, looking fragile and broken with the blood streaked over him.

I swallow, it’s fucking torture, so that I grimace and wheeze a bit more heavily, choking down a useless and likely painful outcry. “Eeft—“ Nothing more than something broken, so dry it’s like twigs snapping, barely more than air, thin and whistling and so ugly. I can’t, I just fucking can’t, so I don’t try again. I just pat at him, gesture more, pull my hand away from my side and show him where the fabric of my tank top is ripped, where I’m bleeding.

His eyes turn huge, mouth half-open with fear. I gesture more, quickly, waving away the worst of his concern. It just looks bad, deep, but he couldn’t have hit anything vital or I’d be dead. The navigator nods, shrugs out of his uniform jacket, and lifts the bloodied tank top over his head. I can see him shaking, but he’s trying not to let me see, trying not to show how desperately exposed he feels, so I avert my eyes and carefully take off my own tank top without pulling too much at the wound.

His teeth and hands make neat work of it, quickly shredding the white fabric into long strips. I bet he knows how to sew, I bet one of his fussing aunts showed him how, taught him how to sew a button and hem fucking socks. I wonder if he ever thought it’d be like this, when he joined Fleet to go be a hero. I’m glad I can’t fucking talk, so I won’t say something stupid like tell him he’s brave, that he ought to be proud of being a lamb, like I’m proud of being a mouse, because it took a lamb and a mouse to take down the wolf.

He helps me fold my grey tank top into a fat square and set it over the puncture. I hiss, flinch, let him press hard against the swell of dark blood. He wraps the white strips from his tank top tight and then ties the whole makeshift bandage together. Afterward he shrugs back into his jacket, clutching the fabric closed rather than simply fastening it, hands shaking and eyes huge.

I get to my feet, slow, careful, trying not to pull my side anymore than necessary. I look up and down the maintenance passageway, figuring out where the fight took us, where we need to go from here. The navigator scrambles to his feet, wobbly, wincing, bruised somewhere deep inside from being placed over the altar for the slaughter.

When I grab the fighter’s boots, the navigator whitens further, so he’s just a sickly grey-skinned terror with big round-eyes in a soft round-face. I shake my head to let him know he doesn’t have to help and then nod up toward the darker section of the corridor, away from where this whole mess started. He knows what to do, this is part of the plan, and his boots ring against the floor with an almost trembling sort of hush, or maybe I’m imagining things.

He feels along the wall as the corridor narrows, darkens, dissolves out of a clear walkway and into a path between pipes and coils. We’re not supposed to be down here, but he’s a navigator, he’s smart, he came up with a plan and we’re going to follow through. I drag the fighter’s corpse along with me, struggling with the weight, determined not to make the little navigator help. He’s squeamish, clearly, whereas I don’t care. The wound at my side pours wet rebuke from the effort, so that I start to feel weak, sick, dizzy, light-headed and silly with it.

We don’t have far to go, that’s part of the plan. He feels along the seam and then finds the panel, keys in the access code, so that the section slides away to expose a blast of heat and the grinding, pulsing, churning sound of whirling, pounding, treacherous machinery. I push past him, drag the fighter along behind me, find the narrow walkway above the vast, open chasm. There’s not many places on the Sleipnir like this, and it’s clever of the navigator to think of it. When they find his machine-battered corpse, the snarled mass of blood and bone won’t betray the knife wounds, it’ll just look like some clumsy, stupid accident. Or maybe they’ll think someone threw him over in a fight, but command will happily chalk it up to being an accident if the evidence points in that direction.

Getting him against the rail and then over it is difficult, not going to lie, and afterward I sink to the walkway and hunch over my wound, shaking, sweating, sick with it. The bandage is soaked through. I don’t realize the little navigator has crept up toward me until he’s there, petting at my hair, asking if I’m okay.

“God, you’re so pale.” He whispers, or maybe it just seems that way because of the rushing roar of the machinery. “Deimos, what are we going to do?”

Big eyes, big round eyes, pleading at me and trusting in me so implicitly, because I fought the wolf for him even if he had to save me in the end. I nod, which isn’t much of an answer, and he helps me to my feet. I have to lean against him pretty heavily, we’re about the same size honestly, he just seems so much littler because he’s a navigator, cream-colored, splattered with blood.

I stumble along beside him, it’s not really walking, what I’m doing, but I’m upright and moving all the same. We make it back to where we started, to the shadowed bit of corner where I was hiding. He lowers me carefully, slowly, setting me upright against the wall. There’s a pile of our things, everything we brought for the plan, tucked behind the jutting ridge of some pipes. He looks over it, slow, then quick, efficient, remembering what we said we’d do. I try to pull myself up from the floor, to help, but he pushes me back down, hushes at me.

I lean back against the wall, breathing shallow, eyes half-closed, rasping and whistling from the renewed ruin of my throat. He putters around, sniffling slightly, so that I’m not sure if he’s crying or just stuffed up from the earlier waterworks. He’s mopping up the worst of the blood, getting things cleaned, making it look like we didn’t just have some terrible fight to the death down here.

Maybe I fall asleep, or maybe I’m just letting my thoughts drift, but he has to kneel next to me and do quite a bit of pleading before I respond, stir, jerk wildly and try to take a swing at him. I’d been half-hallucinating, half-delirious, thinking the wolf had the lamb on his knees, making all those wet, awful sounds, and I’m trying to save him – But he’s there in front of me, jerking out of range so my wild punch doesn’t land.

“Deimos, it’s okay,” he says quickly. He’s holding my change of clothes out to me, the jacket and pants that I brought, along with my boots, because we had this all the fuck planned out, thinking we were so goddamn clever.

He’s already changed, back to being pristine and cream-colored, the worst of the blood rubbed off his face. It’s dried into his hair from the wolf pawing at him, and I shudder away from looking at it. I don’t want to think about what I saw, no more than I’m sure he wants to think about what happened. His eyes are still too wide, too round, full of fear, and I wonder if the wolf scared him more being dead than alive.

I put on the clean jacket, swap out my pants, shove my feet into my boots. We look a little less like murderers now, halfway respectable, like it never fucking happened. The navigator takes my hand, hauls me to my feet, and it’s a long minute where I just lean against him, bleeding, wheezing, maybe not able to do this after all.

“Deimos, what should we do?”

I shake my head at him, I don’t fucking know, since me getting cut open wasn’t part of the original plan. I thought it’d be easier that way, me and the wolf both dead, cut up, so clearly on the losing end of some fight. It’d be easier for the lamb to just walk away. I didn’t expect to pick a fight against the wolf and survive. I was counting my heartbeats, waiting for the last one, fully expecting to die. Being alive is a little strange, almost hysteric, punch-drunk for having cheated death.

I get a hand free of him without falling back down, the shaking in my knees starting to settle out into trembling steadiness. I gesture, it isn’t much, but it’s all I can do to explain. Maybe he understands, maybe he doesn’t, but he stops asking me what to do in those pleading, miserable tones that I can’t stand. He’s got the soiled clothes and such shoved into the same backpack we used to get everything down here in the first place. My knife he lets me take, so I can slip it back into my sleeve. I don’t know what he decided to do with the wolf’s knife.

The walk back is a nightmare of ragged, ruined breath and woozy staggering, keel-pitch drunk, arm over the navigator’s shoulder so I don’t fall, head down and eyes unfocused, glazed with what pain starts making it through the shock. The gash needs stitches, I’m not an idiot, I know I can’t just slap a bandage over a fucking stab wound, but there’s nothing we can do except runaway, get clear of the crime scene, wash our hands of blood and figure things out from there.

The Sleipnir is dark, quiet this late at night, so we hardly run into anyone up at the dorm levels other than a few unsteady fighters going the opposite direction. They don’t see us, too busy being drunk, so my stumbling gait doesn’t stand out anymore than theirs. The navigator gets tense at the sight of them, I have to force him to keep going, taking the lead so we arrive back at his room. I’m not going to let him go wandering alone to jump at shadows, not with the blown-open terror still evident in his expression.

It takes him a moment to realize where we’ve ended up. He keys open the door, quickly, so we can blunder inside, into the dark room, with the panels whisking shut behind us. I don’t need to remind him to be quiet, so we don’t wake his fighter.

The little navigator drags me toward the bunk, but I balk, get free of him, hunch over my side like some goddamn bell-ringer in a stupid old book. He doesn’t need me for this, his fighter can keep him safe until morning, and I need to go lick my wounds somewhere, figure out an explanation for medical or learn to fucking sew buttons and hem socks so I can stitch my side back together.

“Deimos?” He whispers, comes after me, clutching at my hand in the near-perfect darkness. I can just see the pale outline of his face, the sucked-in terror of his eyes, the fearful way he doesn’t want to let me go. I can hear the tremble in his voice. “Do you want to stay here tonight?”

Because he’s scared, somewhere deep inside, and he doesn’t trust his new fighter anymore than he trusted his old fighter. I’m a fighter, too, so I don’t know why I’m so goddamn special, except maybe that I fought the wolf for him. I stare at him, trying not to remember how all that sympathy got beaten into him, how he looked bent over the altar for the slaughter, and all those fucking terrible noises. I almost hate him, for one brilliantly intense moment, before I let him pull my arm back over his shoulder so we can stumble over to the bunks.

He slips off his boots, I kick free of mine, he scurries up the ladder and I just stare up at him. He realizes the difficulty and reaches down for me, whispering, so it’s an almost amusing bit of struggle and encouragement until I realize that even if I get up there, I sure as hell won’t be able to make it down again short of falling.

“We could do the beds together,” hushes the navigator, “except Praxis is asleep.”

“No, I’m not,” says the fighter at last. I’d been wondering when he would admit it. I see the shape of him pull upright in the lower bunk. “Have you two been drinking again?”

 _I wish_. And I’m just silly enough from shock and adrenaline and whatever else the fuck’s wrong with me that I laugh, or try to, gurgling air out of the shattered ruin in a way that’s uglier than usual and leaves me breathless, wheezing, making a strange, hollow accordion sound afterward.

Which is probably when he realizes we’re not drunk, because the little navigator starts fussing at me, asking if I need water, coming down the ladder to get at me and hold me steady. The fighter shifts around, finds his tablet and turns it on, so there’s a soft glow of greenish light that catches us in a way that can’t be good. Then he’s up, scrambling around, getting out of bed and asking a frantic series of questions.

He think it’s the navigator who’s worse off, and maybe he is, all that deep hurt where it doesn’t show, not just the bruises on his face. “What happened? Are you all right?” And then he looks at me, shines that fucking tablet in my face, takes my arm in his big hand hard enough to bruise because he’s so worried it’s become fear, just repeating the same stupid questions like I’ll give him anymore of an answer than the navigator. “What happened? Are you all right?”

The navigator’s frozen, clung on to my other side and speechless. It’s about then my knees decide they’re tired of shaking and just give way entirely, so I slump into a slow, drooping collapse. They both try to catch me, but the fighter’s faster, he gets both arms around me first, holds my weight upright against him.

“Oh! Deimos!” The navigator sounds more disappointed than anything, like he really thought this would work. That’s probably my fault. I should have separated from him at the lift, let him take the short walk from there to his dorm alone. It isn’t like the shadows are real, the wolf’s dead, he doesn’t have to be afraid anymore.

The fighter’s hand accidentally goes into the swath of wet bandaging as he adjusts his grip, tries to lift me so I can’t fall. I make some stupid whistling hiss, breath turning short and rasping, until he pulls his hand away. “Is this blood?” He’s the one who sounds strangled now, not me, because I can’t say a word.

“Oh,” sniffs the little navigator, like that’s any answer at all.

“This is blood,” he says, voice shaking. “What the hell happened, Ethos?” He figures out where to hold me so it doesn’t hurt, picks me up like it’s nothing, so that my head lolls into his shoulder.

“Oh.”

I might try to slap sense into him if the navigator just keeps saying it like that, in smaller and smaller whimpering tones of defeat.

“I’m taking him to medical. You come, too. Your nose looks bad.”

Well that’s rude of him. The navigator’s nose probably isn’t broken, just round and bruised even rounder.

“Oh,” he says again, sharp, almost crying it. “You can’t!”

“Why the hell not?”

“Um.” The navigator plucks at my sleeve, brushes the fighter’s arm, fluttering at the both of us in silent distress. He doesn’t know what to do, this wasn’t part of the plan. He did what he needed to do, the stupid little lamb for the slaughter, and now I’ve got to be the one to help get this fixed since I’m the one who fucked it up in the first place. I didn’t think I’d survive.

“Was it Logos?” The fighter snarls, a blustering lion, hands tightening over me in a way that’s still gentle, like he’s trying to grab all the pieces before they can float away. “Ethos, did he hurt you? Did he hurt Deimos?”

I move, startling him, because he thinks I’ve passed out cold already. It takes some careful focus to figure out where my body ends and his begins, the way he’s got me held close, but I get my hand into the back of his neck, curling at the silk-fine strands. He bends his head, knows what I need from him, and my lips are right up against the crest and wrinkle of his ear before I dare try.

And nothing, just a whispery dryness, hitched and shrill. So much for that idea.

It just makes the fighter’s eyebrows scale up into frantic levels of worry, and then he’s leaving with me. Well, all right. I guess I’d rather go down for murder than bleed to death, since maybe the little navigator can lie and say it was self-defense. I look enough like I’ve lost the fight for that.

“Oh!” He grabs hold of the fighter’s arm, stumbles along, abandons that idea and throws himself in front of the door instead. “No! You can’t. You’ll ruin everything.”

“Ethos, get out of the way.”

“Praxis, please! He’s okay. He said it wasn’t bad.” He’s pleading for that to be the truth, he’s so desperate to think that I haven’t gotten myself killed, that the wolf’s not going to win after all. He talks faster, digging the hole deeper with the effort. “You can’t take him to medical, we’ll both get in trouble. Deimos is okay, he’s just tired – I mean, he lost a lot of blood, but he’ll be okay. Please, Praxis, please don’t ruin this.”

He starts to cry, all that snow-white purity and sugar-sweetness melting under the downpour so it’s just something sad and broken, how desperate he wants it to be okay now that we’ve killed the wolf, when he’s never killed anyone before, when I’m sure he doesn’t want to think all that closely about what happened, about what I saw. He should know I wouldn’t ever tell anyone about it, not when I can barely breathe, not when it was part of the plan. I won’t tell anyone, and I can’t even tell him that, reassure him it’ll be okay, it’ll stop hurting eventually. We’ll be able to put the pieces together again.

I can feel the fighter speaking, gentle and slow, because the words rumble into his chest and enter into the places where our bodies touch. I’ve still got my hand against the back of his neck, fingers curled into his hair, which is nice. I focus on that until everything else fades away. 


	26. Chapter 26

There’s a lot of talking, which is real fucking annoying since I’m trying to sleep. It’s not even like I can recognize the sounds as words, just the cadence of them. Short, soft, strange, soothing, maybe familiar voices, maybe not, and this obnoxious hollow whistling, like the air falling out of a tire, up and down with a sandpaper rasp, but my lungs are vibrating so, fuck, I guess that’s my fault.

Lots of pain, kind of everywhere, and then one sharp sting, needle sharp, I can make a guess at what that means when the numb starts to flow, cold numb, trapping me, luring me, dulling the pain but taking everything else with it.

So I’m nothing for a while, something grey and aching for a bit longer, irritated and desperate in turns. I think someone’s talking to me again, all hushed up and whispering, trying to tell me shit’s okay when I don’t even know what’s wrong. I get scared, forget why, try to fight someone, there’s a sharp prick sensation again and more numb, more nothing.

Next time I’m something it’s not so bad, not so broken, like maybe I can figure out what the fuck’s happening and where I am. Everything’s soft, white, cold, numb, like maybe this is snow even though I’ve only seen it on the vids. I get my eyes open a little more, slow, my lashes heavy and unresponsive.

I’m in medical. White sheets, the white curtain around the bed, white ceiling, and a cream-colored navigator watching me, just staring at me like I’m some kind of dancing fucking elephant for having managed the heroic feat of opening my eyes. And the navigators, they all look alike after a while, I don’t even recognize him until he turns his head, calls like for a loyal hound, “Cain. He’s awake.”

A fighter’s boots against the floor, and then the curtain parts with a strong sweep of his hand. I want to take a picture and frame it, the way he looks, my mad dog turned into a young pup again, eyes big, brows tight, trying not to look like he cares. He’s so relieved, so tense, wound up and furious because I’ve made things awkward for him.

It fucking hurts, and isn’t fair, I don’t want him looking at me like that just as much as I’m desperate for him to always look at me like that.

He crosses behind his navigator, trailing the tips of his fingers along the white uniform jacket in a way that’s both intimate and casual, the same relaxed sort of affection that makes the blond lean toward him, look up at him, smile like they’re alone. The navigator stands, glances at me, looks back at his fighter. The pink, pert, scarred mouth of his stretches in a delicate O-shaped yawn. He doesn’t say anything, just touches the fighter’s shoulder before he leaves us alone.

The dog twitches his mouth at me, grinning in a way that’s smug and irritating. He leans against the side of the bed and touches at my hair, gentle enough that my heart beats faster even though I’m cold all over, terrified, because I want to know where the other pair of fighter and navigator are, the lion and the lamb, I wanted them to be the ones watching over me in medical.

“I saw the other guy, myshonok,” he says. “Piss poor job you did of it.”

There’s some fucking plastic over my face, tubes and the like, so even if I wanted to tell him to fuck off I couldn’t. I turn my head to the side instead since that’s the next best thing.

He knows me well enough to understand. Instead of being angry like I expect, he just laughs, chuckles like it’s so fucking funny, so full of pride it hurts. “Yeah,” he says. “I’d be embarrassed, too, if I were you.”

His brows are still so tight, he’s looking at me with concern, making me wonder how long he’s been hanging around medical making his navigator watch me, trading off shifts. I wonder what the fuck I missed being unconscious, because the last thing I remember sure as hell doesn’t make sense.

He leans down, brushing my bangs aside, gentle so I can’t stand it, but I’m trapped in my own stupid body, so weak all I can do is tip my face into his fingers, hate myself for it, so desperate for his touch that it’s a good thing I can’t talk, can’t beg. I want him to keep talking, to tell me everything I’m missing. I want to ask what’s happened to the fighter with the eye patch, why he isn’t here watching over me. 

Like he reads my mind, which I hope isn’t the case, he taps the side of his face, right in the corner of his eye. “Blind spot, that’s what you should have gone for. Gotten around to his weak side. Really, kiddo, this is your own damn fault.”

I try not to look surprised. My heart beats a little faster.

“Praxis might be big, but he’s dumber than bricks. I would have put good odds on you for the fight.”

Me, fight the lion? What happened to the wolf? I stare at him so long my vision drifts together, loses focus, makes me blink so heavily it’s like my eyes might not stay open no matter how much I will them.

“Says he didn’t mean to get you so good as he did.” He straightens, looms over me, shrugs like it’s nothing. “Guess his navigator saw the whole thing, says it was pretty much a big misunderstanding.”

And he looks at me carefully, so carefully my skin crawls and little, secret thrills jump like grasshoppers all inside me. If I tell him it wasn’t a misunderstanding, or an accident, or whatever the fuck clever little pack of lies they thought up to serve medical, if I tell him the lion hurt me like this, beat me down, he’ll go a fight for me when he’s never bothered before. Maybe it’s because he already hates the other fighter for being sweet on his precious little wet-eyed navigator, maybe he’s feeling guilty and awkward about me sobbing in a cramped utility closet, maybe I made him awkward and guilty again with that last kiss.

I nod, slowly, holding his stare as steady as I can with the bleary half-focus of my eyes. I figure out where my shoulder’s gone to in all this mess and shrug, twist my features in a way that’s hopefully just as wry and bland as I want. _It’s my own fucking fault._

He laughs, yipping, short amusement, a wild dog’s bark. Relieved, since I don’t think he really wanted to go murder someone for me. I feel a horrible bite of bitterness and regret, wondering why the fuck he couldn’t give me that offer against the wolf, because I’ve no fucking doubt that a mouse and a dog could take down a wolf. But it wasn’t his fight, it’s over, I’ve just got to let the consequences go.

He sits down in the chair, right where the navigator was. He lights up a cigarette despite a thousand signs telling him not to, and the acrid smoky smell tickles at my eyes and nose. He leans back like it’s nothing, so fucking full of pride, grinning at me like it’s all some big joke.  “Go back to sleep, myshonok. I’ll be here when you wake up again.”

I don’t really want to, I’m still so full of questions, but he doesn’t have the answers and even if he did, I don’t think he’d give them to me. I almost want to stay awake to spite him, prove to him I don’t need someone watching over me, that I’m not so feeble as that, but the smoke’s tickling my eyes so that I blink again, slow and heavy. 


	27. Chapter 27

I’m not sure how much later it is when I wake up to find the round-eyed little navigator watching me. He’s leaned over, fretted brows pulled tight, so attentive that he must have been calling to me, pleading at me to open my eyes. It’s been either the other navigator or my dear junkyard dog all the times before, so it takes me a moment to realize it’s real, he isn’t a dream or nightmare.

“Hi. Are you awake now?” He whispers, like it’s some big fucking secret he’s here.

I nod at him anyway, even though it’s a stupid question.

“Oh,” he says. And then bites his lip, like he’s going to cry. He doesn’t look so bad now, all cleaned up like this, back to being cream-colored and sweet. There’s an ugly kind of bruise across the crest of his round little cheek and some of the roundness in his nose is more than it should, but he doesn’t look so bad. Maybe not okay, with the punched-in dark circles under his eyes, like he hasn’t slept in forever and needs it, but not so bad.  

“I wanted to come see you sooner, but Cain’s always been here.” He glances around, like he’s afraid the dog might come bursting through the curtain at any minute.  “And I don’t think I’m supposed to be here, not since Praxis…” He stops, bites his lip again, leans closer to study me. “How are you feeling?”

Like fucking shit, but I can’t tell him that. I just shrug instead, using the shoulder that doesn’t pull at anything. I crawl my hand over the top of the blanket trying to find him, but it’s a stupid gesture that I let stumble out before completed. I’d ask him the same, but I already know the answer and don’t want to hear a lie. He looks like he hasn’t slept in forever, and I bet my nightmares are just the same as his, only from a different perspective.

He nods as if I’ve given him a wealth of information rather than none at all. “Deimos, I’m so sorry. I nearly got you killed. I was just so scared, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know where you’d gone or where I was – I should have gotten there sooner, you could have died. You did nearly die, I couldn’t do anything about it—“ He speaks quickly, rushing the words out at me faster and faster, so it’s almost dizzying, frantic, hard to follow. I lose track of the apologies, like it’s his fault I got cut, like we both didn’t know the plan going into it, like I didn’t go down into those maintenance passages expecting never to come out again.

He’s still going, but I can’t listen to anymore about how sorry he is, so I bat at him with my hand until it connects, fumbles over him, fingers scratching and curling. It makes him grab me, squeeze tight, fall into wide-eyed, trembling silence.

I close my eyes, struggle with it for a moment, wheezing something that’s hardly more than air. He hears me, starts shushing me, soft at first and then frantic. “Deimos, no, don’t – just rest, it’s okay. Don’t try to say anything.”

I nod, give up, lay still until my breathing settles into aching quiet rather than blisteringly loud effort. He runs his thumb over my knuckles, soothing at me, making me wonder just how close to dying I came between collapsing in his dorm and waking up in medical. It reminds me to ask about his fighter, to find out what the hell’s going on, and I pull my hand free of him. It takes me a minute to think about it, several moments more to get my arm to coordinate.

I don’t like how my face feels, since I’ve still got all that tubing and medical junk plugged into me. The I.V. line in my hand brushes at the rest of it as I pat at my eye, only a few times before even that small gesture is too much and my hand falls limp back to the bed.

His mouth flattens, curved down, he doesn’t understand for a minute and then he gets it, goes wide-eyed, leans even closer and speaks even quieter. “Praxis? Oh. Oh, yeah. That’s – that’s why I came to see you.” And then he tells me quickly, whispering, more or less the same story I heard from Cain only from the beginning, when I passed out from blood loss and everyone started panicking, and the little navigator confessed more or less everything – “I didn’t tell him about – about the plan, I just told him I – I got caught by Logos again, I didn’t—“ He bites his lip, shudders, looks ready to cry but doesn’t. “I didn’t tell him what happened. Just that the two of you fought. That he tried to kill you.”

He didn’t tell the fighter that we set the whole thing up, that we planned it like two little conspirators, that the night he found us drunk we’d been toasting a horrific murder plot. He probably didn’t mention getting laid out for the slaughter, about how I had to watch the whole thing, about how that was the fucking plan.

And I don’t fucking blame him, so I just nod so he’ll keep talking, get to the part that matters. “No one would ever believe us if we said you and I got in a fight and _I_ won.” The navigator looks bashful at that, like I’ll be offended to have apparently gotten my ass kicked one way or another. “So Praxis said – Praxis—“ And he stumbles, lip tucked tight again, only this time his round eyes moist over and his throat bobs around erratically against a sob, because he’s so fucking brave and I bet no one’s ever told him.

I get cold, fearful, wondering why the fighter hasn’t come to see me, wondering why his little round-faced navigator looks so distraught, like he hasn’t slept in forever.

“It had to look like a real fight,” he says. “But, Deimos, you lost much blood, and your neck…” He swallows, and I have to be bruised up good and strong from the wolf’s jaws for him to look so sick about it. I’m glad there’s no mirrors in medical, not where I can see at least, so my world is just white ceiling, white sheets, white curtains.

“They stitched him up just fine, so now he’s in the brig. Deimos, I don’t know what to do. This is all my fault – I shouldn’t have let him do that. I should have just taken you straight to medical. Told them I’d done it, to – to hell with what they thought. I could say I did it in your sleep, that I thought you were Phobos or something. They’d believe me if I said I wanted to stab Phobos.”

I roll my head over the pillow, denying him, denying that it’s his fault, but inside I’m just as frantic. I wish the fighter was here so I could slap him, yell at him, call him an idiot for having to be the big stupid hero like this. The brig! And me still laid up in medical, half-dead, strangled and stabbed, and the navigator can spin whatever pretty excuses he likes, no one’s ever going to take it with more than a grain of salt because they’re partners. Of course they’d lie for each other.

“Deimos.” He’s whispering again, but in a way that’s like he can’t be any louder, in a way I understand all too well. “Deimos, what do we do?”

I nod, trying to reassure him, but it’s the longest I’ve been awake so far and things are starting to go sideways again. I nod, reach for him, so he takes my hand and holds it between his own, palms warm despite how scared he looks. He’s brave. Someone should tell him that.

I swallow, still a torturous action, but maybe less than before, or probably it’s that the drugs dripping through all the plastic tubing are strong. I lay still, eyes closed, with just enough squeeze between our clasped hands to let him know I’m awake. I’m thinking, or trying to, but nothing wants to stay put long enough, so it’s like catching water in my hands, I can only hold so much.

Well, I’m not dead. That’s something. Even with a little navigator for a witness, if I’d bled to death before medical could sew me shut, they would have executed the fighter for murder. I’m not dead, so that’s something, and I grip the navigator’s hand, hard, drawing his attention away from glumly staring at the floor.

I pull my hand free, because moving the other one hurts, and find my throat. It’s the lightest touch possible, low in the hollow of it, and then I leave my hand rested high across my chest. I’ll tell whatever embarrassing lie necessary to make this my fault, so they’ll believe a scrawny grey mouse picked a fight and lost, I’ll sing them a fucking song if they want.

I think he understands me, the way his frown melts out into a wan, hesitant smile. I bet he hasn’t smiled since I told him the plan was on, the stupid plan that seemed so much easier when we were half-drunk and getting drunker on rich, warm brandy.  

“Thanks,” he says. Which is stupid, because I don’t know why he’s bothering to thank me. It isn’t like I’ve done anything to deserve it. He sits with me a while longer, until I’m not there to see when he leaves. 


	28. Chapter 28

My navigator comes to visit, which is maybe the most messed up part of it all. It isn’t like we have much to say to each other, not since I whored myself out to his best friend, or whatever the fuck they are. He just sits there pouting, mad that I’m dropping us even lower in the rankings, and it isn’t like I can say anything to him and he knows it. I can’t say anything to anyone, I have to save all my words for when they count.

The round-eyed little navigator manages to slip past the mad dog’s persistent watch a few more times, but all we do is clutch each other’s hands and hope for the best. The fighter with the eye patch is still in the brig, distant to us and unknowable, so that the circles under his round-eyes grow darker, and my own fleeting alertness becomes anxious. The navigator and I, we’ve got the truth between us, but in order to make things right, we have to ignore the truth and lie.

Medical releases me just shy of being able to function without them, because that’s how they like to keep us, on edge and fumbling. The mad dog is there when I get released, and I almost hate the gentle way he takes my arm and keeps me upright the whole walk back to my room. I don’t know why he suddenly feels like acting the pup around me, so courteous and gentle that I think he might crawl into the skinny top bunk, just like when we were goddamn recruits.

The round-eyed navigator’s still alone, his fighter locked away in the brig, but hopefully the darkest shadows are under his eyes rather than out in the walkways. I’ve done everything I can to make the dark safe for him, so he doesn’t have to be afraid, so that his eyes may never know such deep sympathy ever again. I only see him at meals, sitting alone, poking at his food, trying not to look at the other half of the mess hall, where I’m sitting, where his fighter isn’t sitting.

It’s a week after my release from medical that the upper command sets about finding the truth, or what truth they’ll get, from the three of us, sworn conspirators, even if the stories might not match entirely. I still can’t say much, my throat is such a fucking disaster, but I guess they know that. I guess they don’t really care. It isn’t like they actually want me to start singing. They just need to know if this will affect the mission, if we’re all going to make trouble or if it’s done, resolved with violence, so that we’ve all learned a lesson and can focus on the enemy from now on.

I get three weeks in the brig. Three long, dark, terrible weeks, so it feels like forever. I don’t know what they’re going to do with the other fighter, the one they think cut me open, bruised my throat so I spend half the court-martial either nodding, shrugging, or shaking my head. Three weeks, so it feels like forever, and I don’t see him the whole time, but I like to think he’s just on the other side of the cold walls, just beyond the range of my hoarse, whispering pleading. I just want to know what they’ve done with him, what’s happened to him, if he’s okay. I just want to know if he’s okay, if we’ll be okay, if anything will be okay after the three weeks are done. 

 

 

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I recorded [audio](https://soundcloud.com/violetnyte/replacement-chapter-28-by) of this chapter


	29. Chapter 29

I don’t even realize they’ve let him out until he’s just there, standing amid all the other fighters at the briefing, lopsided dark gaze and chin held high, like nothing ever happened, so full of pride I don’t know what to do. I’m standing next to the junkyard dog same as always, things between us almost gentle. I’ve kept so resolutely to myself, not bothered him with the awkwardness of it, not made him think about the cramped utility closet even though half my dreams take place there, the other half down in the maintenance passages, and the worst of them somewhere that’s both simultaneously, so horrible that I wake shrieking, or trying to scream, but it’s just a rasping, wheezing, hissing destruction from my throat, so I don’t even wake my navigator with it at least.

And there he is, standing there, whole and clean, like nothing ever happened, and my heart is jumping around like something burning, something wild, so that I can’t help but stare. It’s impossible to know if he sees me, impossible to think he’s ignoring me, so that I just stagger through the physical training like I’m fresh out of medical, white-faced and shaking by the end of it. The dog jeers at me, same as always, friendly and smirking so long as I don’t make things awkward again.

I lose track of him between training and the showers, so that I have to lurk around the outside of the fighters’ base hoping to see him. I let the dog get past me, let him go to find his navigator so they can squeeze out a quick fuck before lunch. I try not to look like I’m desperate, that I’m hanging around just for a few stolen minutes with him, that my hands aren’t shaking, my heart jumping.

He finds me so quickly I think maybe he was searching for me as well, looking everywhere with his lopsided-gaze, footsteps brisk and then slow, deliberate, approaching me with care. I’m frozen in place, leaned against the wall like it’s casual when it’s tense, so intense, everything between us and then nothing, just his arms around me, my arms around him, the two of us together again.

He pushes me away, abrupt, anxious, keeping his hands on my shoulders so it isn’t a complete rejection. “We shouldn’t stay here,” he says. He looks up and down the hallway, nervous and fretful, one eye wide. “Someone could see.”

It isn’t until he takes me by the hand, pulls me along, finds some unused room that’s just storage crates and us, it isn’t until then that I realize what he means. We’re supposed to have fought some fight, he’s supposed to have been the one to nearly kill me, and I guess that makes us enemies now, or at least for a little while, or, I’m not really sure, but it doesn’t really matter now that he’s close enough to look at, to touch.

He leans against the wall, hands behind his back, looking like he wants to hold me again but he doesn’t, even though it’s safe enough with the door locked after us. I have to be the one to set my hands against his chest, feeling at him, making sure he’s solid, sliding underneath his jacket and around, closer and closer until I’m pressed against him head to toe.

It releases him from the wall so that he takes me in his arms again, sets his cheek into my hair, kisses the side of my head, gentle at first, like I’m broken glass, and then tighter, almost frantic, fingers knotting into the fabric of my jacket as he clutches at me. He’s trembling, shaking, just holding me even when I try to turn my face toward him, thinking maybe we can kiss.

“They wouldn’t tell me what happened to you,” he says. He brushes at my bangs, pushing them off my face, looking down at me with such intense concern. “That whole time, I didn’t even know if you were alive. Not until the very end.”

I nod, slowly, because there’s such fear in his eye, something haunted, and it makes my throat feel thick and difficult when I swallow.

He looks me over, hugs me again, so desperate just to feel me against him that I loop my arms over his neck, set my face into his shoulder, tipped on to my toes so it’s not so awkward with our heights. “I’m so glad you’re okay,” he says quietly. A shudder passes through him, like maybe he’s remembering that last night we saw each other, whatever last vision he had of me getting taken by medical, before the questions started.

“Are you okay?” He asks it like the thought just occurred to him, and he puts space between us, edging me away so as to focus the brilliant intensity of his stare over me from head to toe.

I nod, but the furrow of his brow remains tight. His hand slides over my shoulder, hesitates at my collar, doesn’t quiet touch at my neck. His fingers curl into a fist instead, right at the junction between collarbone and shoulder.

“Are you okay?” he asks again, voice husky, raw.

I start to nod and then quickly lick my lips, swallow, lift my chin to test the aching, lingering tenderness. Say it in my dry little rasp, barely recognizable as words, getting better but still so hideously ugly, more than usual. “I’m okay.”

His one eye closes for a moment, a long blinked wince, and I duck my head because it’s such an ugly sound that I’ve made. The hard, stuttering pound of my heart against my ribs is terrible. The gentle touch of him falls against my bangs, lifting them aside so he can kiss my forehead, hold his lips there, pull me tight against him and whisper bitterness and regret into my ear. “I should have killed him for you when I had the chance.”

I nudge my nose into his neck, fold my arms over his back, don’t say anything more because it’s such a pretty moment otherwise, the gentle way he’s holding me, the way I can almost feel his heartbeat against my chest.

He coaxes me forward, to the side, until my feet bump against a section of crates. It’s half him lifting me, half a funny backward kind of hop, so I’m seated where he’s standing between my knees, and our faces are at the perfect kind of angle. I lean into him, eager, eyes bright and attentive, drinking in the sight of him, fingers curling with silent encouragement.

It’s tentative, soft, gentle, almost clumsy like a first kiss all over again. His hand pets over my hair, rests against my cheek, pulling me to him even though we’re so close already. My mouth opens, pliable and willing, so it’s warmth and intimacy, shivering happiness, blotting over the cold, fearful memories of being in the brig. He tastes like sunlight and heat, something wonderful and clean, and I’m starving for him, desperately hungry, but we kiss slow, hesitant and tender.

Every motion slow and careful, the way his hands run over me, push my jacket from my shoulders, thread through my hair and bend my face against his. I start to do the same for him, find his collar and guide the fabric back, but he catches my hands, folds them into his, presses them against his ribs. He squeezes them briefly and then lets me go, the message clear, especially once he slides my jacket back into place and graces a final, near-chaste kiss on my urgent and eager lips.

“We shouldn’t—“ He looks nervous about it again, or maybe I’m imagining things, getting twisted into all my doubts, wondering what I’ve done wrong. But he’s so gentle, stroking a hand over my back, through my hair, curling the thin curtain of my hair over my ear so that it falls forward again, too short to stay there despite his efforts. I search my eyes over his face, anxious, worrying, pleading without words.

Something twists over his features, the ruin beneath the patch pulling in all the wrong directions, the line of his brow crumpling as he leans forward, kisses me deep, plunging, breathtakingly intense, electrifying all the way down. I gasp against him, a smallness from my throat so that’s almost painful in all the best ways, because it’s like he’s hungry, too, like they didn’t feed him down in the brig, like I’m something wonderful.

He nips at my lower lip, drops into me again, nothing slow or hesitant in the way he takes possession, makes my knee press to his side so I slide forward on the edge of the crate, desperate for more touch, more sensation. I rub my hands over him, high across the shoulders, low against his back, and then lower still when he doesn’t stop me, just thrusts his tongue against mine in a way that’s dizzying, delightful, face bent close, looming over me with all his strength and gentleness.

My fingers fumble along the clasps, impatient, making room for my hands to fit between the waistband and the heat of his skin. There is everything hot and shivering about the noise he makes when I find him, brush over his erection, curl my hand around the throbbing hardness of him. He’s not making it easy to get the angle I need, not with the way he crushes me to his chest, kisses me so thorough and insistent that it’s almost painful, lips bruising, heart aching, little sounds that aren’t really anything. I’ve got him in my hand now, pulling at him, stroking him, making him moan into my mouth.

It’s a bit of awkward rearrangement, neither of us wanting to get far apart, hands and mouths welded together and working toward something that’s racing, heart-pounding excitement. I get him backed against the crate, I’m on my knees for him, pushing his pants down, shedding my jacket so there’s less in the way. His hands thread through my hair, knead my shoulders, he’s whispering endearments and encouragement as I stroke him, teasing with my hands and promising with my lips as I suck lightly at his thigh, kiss the heated juncture of his leg to hip.

Sunlight, the musk of him, the taste as I run my tongue along the length of him, nuzzle, still teasing, making him groan and thrust toward me, hands insistent but gentle against my head, not pushing me or rushing me, letting me give him sweet torture. He’s big, hard, dripping and eager, tasting like salt across the back of my throat when I finally enclose him in the heat of my mouth, swallowing, sucking, making him groan and curse.

I push my hands into his hips, pull him toward me, push him away, setting the rhythm because he won’t, he’s so controlled, he’s gentle, he won’t fist a hand in my hair and fuck me, use me, bruise my throat and gag me. I don’t even realize that difference, why this feels so right, why there’s such a fluttering in my chest, sinking down between my legs, growing heavy with desire, something warm and fragile. I tip my gaze up to him, see him watching me, all that same fragile warmth in the way he’s looking at me, something like a smile before his eye closes, his head rolls back, sinful contentment sliding between his lips.

It’s so unnerving that I lose the rhythm, pull my mouth away, get flustered and have to sink back on to my heels, kneeling there with my head down, heart-pounding. It all feels so different that I don’t know what to do, how to explain it, embarrassed to admit to him that I’m just a whore, some slut on his knees, that I don’t know how to do anything other than get fucked.

There’s just silence for a moment, and then shifting as he comes off the crate to join me on the floor. “Deimos?”

I startle at the suddenness of his hand against the side of my face, jolting up into the touch rather than away, kissing him quick to offer apology, maybe something of an explanation, not wanting him to think this is his fault. It surprises him, makes him smile, so he returns a slower, deeper kiss, petting at me with tenderness and not asking what’s wrong, which is perhaps the nicest part of it all.

He lets me set the pace again, starting with slow kisses, letting me run my hands over him, the both of us on the floor. I get his jacket off and pause, pull back, wide-eyed at the harsh red line across his shoulder. A shallow cut, curved at the end, stitched up and scarring over, supposedly my handiwork, and it looks painful. I lean forward, fingers not quite touching, whispering against the skin around the scar. He holds still me, letting me explore, and I kiss at the smooth, unmarred skin of his shoulder above the red line and then below it.

“Can I see yours?” he asks.

I nod, lift my tank top to show him. It’s not so wide, my scar, because the wound went deep. Mine wasn’t faked, and nearly killed me, and he pushes at me, gentle, leans me back so he can kiss my side, above and below the scar. And then pushes me further, slowly laying me down against the floor, stripping the rest of my clothes and his, even down to our socks, so it’s cold air and then the warmth of his body beside mine, the hardness of the floor and the stiffness of his cock jutting against my thigh.

“Does it hurt?” He brushes a hand over my side, avoiding the small, puckered redness.

I shake my head, because it’s the wild beat of my heart that hurts, the hesitant way I don’t know where to put my hands, the shame of how gentle and careful he kisses me, works a hand over my cock, splays me out with affection so that I’m liquid, boneless, almost cringing with how good he’s making me feel.

He puts his hands against my hips, steadying me, sliding down to kiss near my scar again, kiss my belly button so that the sensitive skin ripples and flexes. He runs the warmth of his big hand over my thigh, spreads my knees, and then it’s his tongue running over my stiff cock, tasting at the salty slit, his mouth taking the full of me into wet warmth.

I toss my head, arch against him, toes curling and arms stretching, twisting with the effort of keeping all the little noises in but I can’t, they bubble up and tumble, breaking over my throat, turning ugly because I can’t stop them. He catches my hand, holds it, rubs his thumb over my knuckles and squeezes with the same wicked rhythm of his lips, his mouth, the bob and sink of his head. And then it’s urgency, wildness, terrible things that he’s doing to me, wonderful things, white-heat and electricity, so I don’t have any room for awkwardness, for shame, there’s only the warmth and wet of his mouth, the flex of his hands, one against my knuckles, the other on my thigh.

“Ahn!” I snatch at the cry, biting it down, teeth grit, smaller sounds now, whimpering in a way that’s nothing and everything. Things are becoming sharper, the intensity rising, thoughts obliterating but there’s one important clarity, because he’s unrelenting, pace increasing, matching my short, ragged breaths, so he has to know I’m close, balls tightening, heat pooling, he’s got to stop, slow down, I’m going to—

I find his head, tangle my fingers in his hair, smooth at him, pat at him, try to push him off me, try to twist aside. He keeps me still, holds me down in a way that’s gentle, hums against me in a way that might be words, might not be anything at all. He has to understand I’m close, that he’s shoving at me right over that edge, he’s being reckless about it, driving at me, unrelenting.

“Fff! Pah!” I break into a gasp, push at his head again, trying to get him off me, frantic.

He lifts away, shifts a hand into the place of his mouth, slicking his palm over my cock so that the rhythm doesn’t break. I pull him toward me, kiss him so I can taste myself on his lips, salt between our tongues, thrust into his hand and whine, begging without words.

“Mmm.” Not words, just humming contentment, nestling his lips into my hair, the crook of my jaw, kissing me in places that tickle and make me shiver. I arch to him, wanton, acting like a slut because that’s all I know how to be, I don’t know how to ask for it any other way, I just want him so desperately, with every aching beat from the wildness behind my ribs.

He keeps a hand on me, coaxing, a bit slower now, working me right up against the edge but not sending me over. His lips nibble the crest of my ear. He whispers thickly in a shuddering, pleasurable way. “Not here. Not like this.”

I don’t know what he means, why it’s wrong, except maybe it’s the hard ache of the floor against my shoulders, my spine, my hips, his knees, his elbows as he covers me with his body, so many places for us to touch and connect. His big hand takes both our erections, rubs over them, slicking, a conciliatory offering when I’m wanting something more, a deeper connection, but I’m so close from the heat of his mouth that it hardly matters. I clutch my hands into his shoulders, feel the thin glisten of sweat against his back, the play of his muscles as he rubs to me, thrusts against me, sets a rhythm that’s almost as sweet and dear as I could ever want, hard and fast like good sex, so gentle and strong in all the ways I love.

It’s his breathing, ragged and erratic, and mine, rasping and whispery, little noises between us that get smothered, drowned between our lips, suffocated with the thick heat as he kisses me deep, searching, so it’s like we share everything, each heartbeat, each thrust and slide of skin. I tense, break, buck against him, spill over his hand, against our stomachs, adding to the slickness so that he stiffens, sets his face my shoulder and moans my task name, comes against me, warm and wet.

He rolls to the side, careful not to collapse on me but still pulls me to him so we’re close, both trembling, twitching, emptying out with heaving chests and weak-kneed tenderness. He kisses my face, the crest of my cheek, the jut of my nose, the side of my mouth, everywhere his lips can reach. He curls to me, the lion gone into being a kitten again, nuzzling and mewling without making a sound.

“You’re beautiful when you come,” he says. He kisses me, tenderly, so that I have to believe he means it but can’t accept it all the same, because he’s being embarrassing, making me feel rattled in a way that might be nice if I could get used to it, if I wasn’t already feeling knocked sideways by everything else.

I hunch my shoulders, burrow into him, hiding the heat in my cheeks. It makes him chuckle, a bit breathless still, not quite adjusted down from orgasm and silly with it, wanting to tease me, wanting to hush silly things at me, but he doesn’t say anything else. He just holds me until the air becomes cold against our bare skin, and the sticky wet between our stomachs becomes something rudely insistent.

We sit up, fuss around at our clothes, sort out which of the uniform items belongs to whom by size alone, although I’m pretty sure I end up with one of his socks anyway. He keeps grabbing at me, little random touches and kisses, prolonging the moment so it takes twice as long to get dressed as it should.

He offers to help me up and then keeps me held against him, cheek bent to the top of my head, hands stroking up and down my arms. “Will you come to my room later?”

The question is exciting and anxious all at once. I tip my face toward him, brow tight, puzzling over the offer, over his earlier refusal.

He shrugs, grins, looks away like a chagrined little boy caught skipping curfew. “This was nice and everything, but I spent over a month in the brig. I’m ready for a real bed.”

Abruptly I realize what he means and duck my head, nod quickly, making him laugh again, just softly, not teasing me but happy all the same, hands lingering over me in a way that’s new and tentative. I leave first, so we’re not seen leaving together, and it’s a strange kind of feeling to have something to look forward to, something buoyant that makes me float.


	30. Chapter 30

It’s the little navigator who answers the door, surprising me with the brilliant crookedness of his smile and the sloppy way he says, “Hi, Deimos! Praxis is back!”

Like we’re best fucking friends, the way he falls over my arm and beams at me, like I haven’t spent the entire day meeting the half-shadow quality of the fighter’s gaze and feeling fire in my cheeks, fluttering in my stomach. Like I’ve shown up at their door this late at night just to let this tipsy-drunk little navigator stumble into me and swing off my arm, sweet-soft and cream-colored, smiling like I haven’t seen him do in a very long time. The smile fits his face better than the punched-in dark circles under his eyes, or the glum way I’ve seen him poke at his food during meals, drooped in his seat, every so often looking over at the fighters’ side of the mess hall, like if he just looks one more time, his own fighter will be siting there again.

The fighter comes up behind him, our eyes meet, and his eyebrows lift in silent apology. The navigator pulls me into the room, still chattering. “Praxis said you were coming over! We’re celebrating him getting out of the brig.”

There are the two mattresses, set down and pushed together on the floor, the bedding piled around so as to be comfortable, two glass bottles and two glasses. One bottle is the brandy, drank all the way down to the last swallow, the other is some generic, elicit, clear-colored contraband.

The fighter catches me away from his navigator, pulls me close to whisper in my ear, “Sorry about this. He was rather insistent.”

I just shrug, because of the sobbing way the navigator found me after I’d been released from the brig and apologized for everything, wretched with guilt and nightmares, asking if I’d seen his fighter down in the dark hole where they’d kept me, telling me in whispered horror about how they’d found the wolf, asked him a few questions about it, maybe he hadn’t answered correctly but nothing ever came of it.

I kick off my boots and then sit next to the navigator on the bed. I go along with the change in plans because of the way he looked spread out for the slaughter, the bloodstained puddle of white afterward, and his big moon-round eyes asking me what we should do even though it was his goddamn clever plan, the desperate way he wanted everything to be okay and how it wasn’t, putting dark circles under his eyes.

And now he’s smiling, bright-eyed and eager. “I saved this for you,” he announces. He tips the last of the brandy into one of the empty glasses. Liquid streaks the inside of the glass from earlier use, and he hastily scrubs the pad of his thumb over the rim to clean it.

The fighter sits on my other side, almost sprawled out and lazy with it, just like a lion under the hot sun. His fingers find the side of my foot but stop just shy of tickling me, which is good, since I’d hate to ruin the moment by kicking him the face.

The navigator hands me the glass and then refills his own with the other stuff, no telling where he got it, knowing him probably just from asking nicely. “Praxis, you’re not part of this toast,” he says. Sweetly, like it’s a compliment, the words smashed together enough to reveal how drunk he is.

The glasses clink together and he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t put it into words, and I obviously don’t either. I know what he means, I know why the rich, expensive brandy glides warmth down my throat, why he saved this last bit of it for me. Why he smiles again, different this time, like it’s either smile or cry, before he hastily splashes more liquid into my glass and says, “You and Praxis can share.”

Except we don’t, not really. We exchange a quick look, silently agreeing to something that’s not really anything, and he sits even closer, warm against my side, the glass untouched because neither of us wants to be drunk tonight. The little navigator doesn’t notice the slow, sipped decline of our supposedly shared glass, which should be draining at twice the rate of his. He prattles at us happily, encouraged by nods from me and actual comments from the fighter.

It’s late into the evening now, enough of the liquor drank that the fighter’s taken it, pulled it out of the little blond’s reach so he’ll forget about it. We’ve put water into his glass for him, made him drink it. The little navigator gets a pillow into his lap, hugs at it, chin rested against the softness and knees pulled toward his chest.

“I already asked Deimos,” the navigator says. “But why’d you join up, Praxis?”

I feign disinterest, like it’s a boring question, not looking at the fighter even though he’s so close that every time one of us moves our bodies brush together.

“Same reason as any,” he says. Which is such a clever not-answer that the lamb nods, docile and harmless, no sign of all the steel beneath the wool. He accepted my shrug the same way, so maybe he just likes asking even though he never gets an answer.

“Yeah. Okay.” The navigator sighs and turns his head into the pillow. “S’what I thought.”

He doesn’t say anything more, to the point I think he’s passed out, and the fighter and I look at each other again. There’s a strangled kind of expression beneath the patched-over lines of his face, like the fighter wants to laugh but doesn’t think the situation’s funny enough for it.

Then abruptly the little navigator puts a hand down, pats around at the bedding, finds the hem of one sheet and pulls it toward him. The fighter and I both shift, almost scrambling out of the way, letting the sweet, cream-colored lamb wrap himself in fluff and safety. He lies down and rolls at the same time, curling himself around the pillow and up against the wall in a tight, huddled ball, back to us, still some scared pale lump after everything,

“Ethos?” The fighter starts to reach for him, but I snatch at him, pull his arm, soft at first and then frantic.

I shake my head. My dry rasp, ugly, quiet so it’s nothing, I don’t even know if he hears me. “Don’t. Leave him.”

He frowns at me some, puzzled lines bracketing his mouth, but doesn’t say anything more. We put away the bottles and glasses, moving on tiptoe even though I doubt the navigator can hear us, or if he’d even react if he did. We end up next to the dresser together, wedged into the scant space left in the cramped room with the mattresses set across the floor like they are.  He puts an arm around my waist, pulls me toward him, whispers, “Your room?”

And it’s fucking butterflies when I nod, let me kiss me, slow and full of promise, so that I nearly trip over the soft edge of the mattresses on the way through the room, like I’ve forgotten how my stupid feet work despite them being right there at the end of my legs.

We start walking together, and I’m careful to stand on his good side, the side without the patch. It’s late enough that the dorm floor is quiet, doors closed and panels red to show they’re locked down for the night. I keep alert for footsteps interlacing ours, because we shouldn’t be seen together, in light of what supposedly happened

When we’re in the lift going up to my floor, the fighter runs a hand through his hair, shaking out the dark-silk mane of it, sighs, says quietly, “Sorry about Ethos.”

I shrug, because it doesn’t matter, it isn’t like I care that the little navigator just wanted to sit with us for a while, wanted to celebrate something, wanted to find something worth celebrating.

“I guess he missed me,” he says. Mildly, while frowning, like he’s unable to understand it, like he doesn’t realize how guilty and torn up inside his navigator’s been about the whole mess.

I shrug again, it seems the safest response, because he wasn’t part of the plan and wasn’t part of the toast afterward, and the lift opens on my floor to provide a convenient distraction.

I’m not sure if my navigator is there, or what I’ll say to him to make him leave if he is, so it’s with trepidation that I key open the door and peek inside. He’s not in, which is the best possible scenario, so I step into the cramped little room and let the fighter follow after me. It looks just the same as his, only my navigator’s got a flurry of clutter and junk across the top of our dresser, the top drawer is half-open, and the bedding on the bottom bunk, his bunk, is ruffled up into a disorderly snarl.

I step toward the ladder for the top bunk, suddenly unsure, strangely shy in a way that makes angry, frustrated, almost mad at the fighter for it. Rather than think about it, I just jerk off my boots and set them beneath the ladder. Next goes my jacket, set against the bottom rung. Don’t think about it, just do it. I start to take off my pants as well, but the he stops me, hands gentle, turning me into him and taking a kiss before I can protest, claiming me with heat and something that’s jittery, jolting.

I tense, push against him, make some outburst of air that’s just a “Pfah!” sort of sound. And then I stop, freeze, wonder what the fuck I’m doing, bewildered by my reaction and fearful of the equal confusion I see in his expression, brows down, eye wide, lines creasing his mouth. It makes me even more upset, frustrated so that I feel hot, flustered, nearly panicked. I have to fix it, quick, before he changes his mind, before my silly expectations get out of hand, before I start making this into something it’s not. I go to kiss him, looping my arms around his neck, stretching on to my toes, eyes closing.

It’s the softest, sweetest sort of rejection, pushing against my lips to lower me down, setting our heights between us like a shield, his hands brushing over my hair and staying loose over my shoulders, forcing my arms off his neck. It’s like the fucking storage room all over again, him being nervous and gentle, me searching at his face, trying to read his expression, pleading silently for him to push me down, hold me down, treat me like I expect, like I deserve, like I understand. I’m no good otherwise, I don’t know what to do. I can’t be anything else for him.

My chest is tight, making each breath difficult, so it’s just little shallow puffs through my nose, jaw tense, something lumping into my throat that aches when I swallow. I fucking hate feeling like this, when sex is never something that’s made me nervous or fluttering, never something I didn’t know how to do. I’m not afraid to get fucked, so I don’t know why I’m so skittish now, hands trembling just at the idea of climbing into bed with him tonight.

“Deimos…” He cups my cheek into his big hand, rubs his thumb under my eye like he expects it to be wet. “Is this what you want?” he asks softly.

My head goes up and down, jerking together a nod out of all the tense muscles in my neck and shoulders.

He frowns, worrying at me even stronger than before, so it’s like a separate beast entirely, something nipping at me with cold fangs, poisonous, lethal. He hesitates, leans toward me, kisses my forehead and stays there until some of the tension bleeds out of me. He pulls me to him, gentle, rubbing my shoulders until I’ve relaxed fully, quiet against him with that deep stillness that goes beyond silence.

“Nothing will happen unless you want it,” he says. “I can go back to my room. It can end here, if that’s what you want, and that’ll be okay.”

I shake my head, quick, almost before he finishes speaking.

He cups my head in his hands, pulls me up to him for a kiss. I clutch at his neck, stretched to my toes, and he puts an arm around my waist to hold me there, hold my weight against him, so it’s like floating. I nudge my nose into his hair, breathe in the smell of him, clean heat, warm sunshine. I don’t know if he hears the smallness from the throat, the way I start to speak and then don’t, burrowing into his neck instead, hunching my shoulders.

I don’t understand it, so fuck trying to explain it. I just know that I do want him, that I’m aching for him, that I’ve spent all day thinking about the rhythm and feel of him, the cold press of the storage room floor, the heat of his mouth. I shiver, curl against him, feel his lips against my hair. Pressed and then apart, maybe saying something, but he doesn’t make a sound except heartbeat, thudding into his ribs and reverberating into mine.

“Bed?” I ask, hiding my face, the ragged whisper barely anything.

He nods, nudged off his boots. He sets his jacket next to mine, and then we’re up the ladder, crouched against the ceiling, it’s a bit harder for him than it is for me. We kiss more, slow and gentle, languorous, because I’m letting him set the pace, letting him do what he wants, still unsure of where my hands should go, what I’m supposed to do. The bed seems soft only because of the storage room, the brig. He pulls me to him and undresses me with exquisite care, each of my garments getting matched by his we stay equal, until he’s just in his eye patch.

He sets a hand against the string and glances at me, oddly bashful, reluctant, so it confuses me for a moment. He starts to take his hand away, leaving the shadow in place, and I figure it out like static shock, almost wincing with the rushed, painful way it hits me. I crawl forward, almost in his lap, run my fingers through his hair until I find where the string cuts across the back. I slide it free slowly, kissing first at his brow above the patch, and then ducking to kiss his cheek below.

He holds still, watching me, as I kiss the pads of my fingers and then brush them very gently over the scarred, empty socket. I like the way he looks with and without the patch, the shadowed wholeness of him as well as the lopsided ruin. I wish my silence were as easy to remove, so I could be both for him, a quiet little mouse and whatever I may have been before, whatever I could be again for him. But he half-smiles, one eye bright, intense, lustful and soft, and I forget about scars and silence when he pulls me to him.

We’re lying together, tangled, naked under the sheets. We’re facing each other on the pillow, kissing like how I imagine teenagers kiss in the back of cars, except he’s just holding both my cold little hands in the warm clasp of his big ones, so there’s a purity to it, a chasteness. I keep my hips steady, not wanting to rub at him like some slut, heart pounding because I’m still so skittish and scared about this, because I’m starting to realize he’s not just here to fuck me, this isn’t just sex, but I don’t know what else it is, what else it could be.

He sets one hand against my shoulder, pushing me into the mattress, rising up on his elbow so that he’s leaned over me. His thigh crosses over my hip, so I can feel his arousal, the warm, trickling weight of him against my skin. I part my mouth for him, melt into him, run my hands through his hair because that seems safest, slowest, the least slutty thing I can do so he’ll keep kissing me, plunging with his tongue, cock brushing my hip as he rocks to me.

His hand runs over the plane of my chest, fingers brushing radiant pleasure as he finds the sensitive peaks of my nipples and rubs the rough edge of his thumb, twists the flat of his palm against it, slides his hand down my ribcage and shies away from the scar on my side. He ducks his head, sucking at my neck, almost bruising in a way that makes me pant, cringe, break my resolve so that I move against him, rub at him in return, arching our bodies together.

His mouth moves lower, taking the place of his thumb, teeth grazing, and then lower still, hunching his large frame over me, wrapping his hands over my hips, lifting me to his mouth and kissing, lips working the soft, ticklish places between my legs. The gentle rasp of his tongue finds the base of my cock, making it jump, and then he lifts more, bringing me to him, changing the angle so that he’s against the tight ring of my entrance, prodding, nuzzling, sucking, licking.

I whine, toss my head, he’s both slow and urgent about it, attentive and teasing. I reach for him, wanting to touch him, feel him, wanting to do something for him, and he understands. He lets go of my hips, shifts around, mouth against my cock, straddling me, and now I can get my mouth on him as well, run my hands over his hips, his ass, squeezing at him, there’s a rhythm to it because he’s swallowing me down, rocking, just the same as I’m flexing at him with lips and tongue, sucking, kissing.

He doesn’t let it end that way, although I could, he’s got me aching for him, weeping salt that he licks from the slit of my cock. He changes thing again, just when I’m ready to burst, slowing the rhythm and slipping free of my mouth, shifting around again with the awkwardness of the low ceiling, lining our bodies together in a different way.

I start to follow after him, eager and getting pushy with it. He has to catch me, kiss me, so I can taste myself on his tongue, just like I’m sure he can taste himself on mine. He strokes me, slow, steady, keeping my cock in hand, not quite pushing me off him but it’s close, the way he eases into me, changes things. He’s making it more than just sex again, reminding me of it, so I’m almost embarrassed except he’s so gentle, so patient.

He gets me on my back again, kissing me, stroking, bring his hand from my cock to my hip, just rubbing at my thigh, kneading the soft skin, the hard muscles beneath. It makes me arch, flex against him, tangling our mouths together. I set my hands over his back, trusting, open to him, knees parting when he sets a hand under my shoulders and lifts me into the pillow, getting the angle just right.

He starts to lick his fingers, I didn’t think to bring anything better up to the bunk with us, but I nudge him with my chin, part my mouth for him. He touches my lips, hesitant, almost shaking with restraint, and when I pull his fingers into my mouth and begin to lick and suck it makes him moan, rub his erection into my thigh, breathing tight as we stare at each other not saying anything but making little sounds all the same.

He pulls his hand away, sets it down between my legs, presses and rubs without entering me, so that it’s sweet torture, the anticipation building. I curl a hand into the back of his hair, stare at him, so he’s staring back at me, the moment breaking down into heartbeats and breaths, until he lowers, kisses me, pushes in at the same time so I gasp against his lips.

He goes slow, taking his time, working first one finger and then another, stretching, making my chest heave, fingers flex, breath hiss. He sets his forehead into my shoulder, hunched over me, big and gentle, pooling the heat of his breath into my collarbone, like this is difficult for him as well, like he’s the one getting spread open with such careful, maddeningly slow affection.

I grab for him, get pushy again, I don’t mean to, don’t realize I’m doing it until he’s kissing me, hushing at me between the press of our lips, “Just let me. Just relax.”

Now he’s got a third finger, still taking his time, like I’m some virgin splayed out beneath him but, oh, he’s making me feel like it, the way I’m so eager for him but shy, unsure, plucking at his shoulders and running my hands over the play of his muscles. There’s all this fluttering in my chest, all this sudden fear, something wild and exciting that makes me whine, bend to him, makes him smother me with affection, murmur my task name, nuzzle at my face, align his hips, settle between my thighs. My heart beats faster, my breath quickens.

Pressure, slow, he rests against me and then pushes, still slow, muscles stretching, past the tight ring at the entrance, all the way in, oh, fuck, stars across my vision, searing white heat, so fucking good because he’s so fucking gentle, so slow, just sheathed in me and not even moving, letting me adjust to being filled. I don’t even recognize the little sounds as being mine until he kisses my throat, soothes at me, sharply worried so that I have to nod, let him know it’s beyond okay, he isn’t hurting me. I dare to roll my hips, just slightly, encouraging him, so that breath falls out of him, tension slides off him, he rolls his hips as well and, oh, fuck, it’s good.

He rocks into me, nothing rushed about it, taking his time, arms around my back to hold me to him, cradling me, moving to me with such slow, gentle strength. Such slowness, like ocean tide, controlled and calm despite the shudder of his breathing, the taut line of his shoulders. He’s deliberate, it hardly counts as fucking, and it’s not, it’s nothing like that, I don’t even know what this, but it’s not that. It’s us, together, savoring the connection, making it special, so much tenderness in the way he moves, the way his fingers stroke at my bangs, pulling them aside so he can kiss my eyebrows, the tip of my nose, so he can rub our cheeks together and nestle into me.

And then it happens, almost, I can tell with the sudden thickness in my throat, the unsteady hitch of my breath, the way I have to clench my jaw and arch toward him, whipcord pleasure distracting me from the strange urge to cry. I don’t, thank God, because I’d never be able to explain it to him if I did, but there’s some dry sob anyway, a breaking point within me where something fractures.

“Deimos,” he whispers, thick and choking, and then thrusts into me in a way that’s real, that’s more than just gentle rocking, a way that brings the pieces together just as swiftly as they’ve become broken. He’s faster with it now, harder, still so gentle but urgent, shifting to hold my hips, set me into just the right angle so it’s good, wonderful, unbelievably good. “Ah, Deimos!”

Well, fuck, that’s the last of it, that’s everything, I’m nothing, just flash and stars, driving thrusts, getting pushed into the bed with it, heat and pleasure, right there on the verge of something when he slows, brings it down, pumps into me deeply, deliberately, almost fully out before back in again, I was so fucking close and now I’m down again, trembling.

“Mmn! Aahn!” He’s got me held, insistent about it, keeping the pace slow again, so all I can do is gasp ugliness, hate myself for it, bite my lip so it stops.

He notices, shifts the angle, gets where he can reach my face, my knees high against his side, ankles wrapped around his waist, so I can control the thrusts as well, lift my hips to meet his, but I’m matching his slowness, not pushing him faster, letting myself enjoy it. He runs his finger over the bite of my lip, leans close, kisses me. Says, “Don’t do that. You sound so pretty.”

Fire, everywhere, I’m burning with it, embarrassed in a way that’s giddy, like maybe I should be mad he’s talking like that, like maybe I want him to say it again, because no one’s ever said anything like that to me, because it’s a lie but such a nice one to hear. I toss my head, lift my arms to my face, try to hide the stupid, controllable smile.

He pulls my arms down and holding them to the bed, gentle, hands clasped so it isn’t like he’s pinning me but holding me instead, holding my hands. His cock slides into me with such a slow, deliberate rhythm, I have no idea how he manages to stay so calm about it, how he can lean close and say things like, “And don’t hide your face, either. You’re beautiful. I want to see you come.”

“Aahn.” Not words, just rasping, it takes me a minute to sort everything out enough to be coherent, to push past reluctance and whisper, “It’s good.” I swallow, bite my lip, force myself to stop, force myself not to hear the dry, raw little voice that says, “Want more.”

I’m afraid for a moment it was too much, too pushy, but, no, it makes him close his eye, groan, push into me with insistence, pick up the pace so it’s thumping quickness, hard but still gentle, hips smooth, not rough at all, just electrifying, so good just as I told him, just like he wants to make it for me. It’s building, climbing, reaching for that peak, breathing fast, heart racing, everything getting tight, tensing, ready for it, and he wraps his hand over my stiff, aching cock, pumps in tandem with how he’s pushing into me, fucking me in that way that’s different, it’s still sex, it’s just different, it’s—

It takes barely anything, just a few strokes of his hand over me, I was so close already, so I’m gone, destroyed, utterly nothing, helpless in a way that’s wonderful, little noises, small sounds, not caring that they’re ragged, that my voice sounds ugly to me because it’s something beautiful I want to give him. I don’t care about anything other than how good it feels, this warmth deep inside, the way I shudder and spill, the sense of release and something more, something real, something I want to keep forever.

I’m limp and twitching, sated, he’s still in me, hand slicking over me, pulling the last drops of pleasure from me. He slows, shifting, hoisting my hips so it’s deep thrusts, all the way in, he’s grunting softly with the effort. I’m just watching him through half-lidded eyes, nothing real and everything vivid, marveling at the way his breathing grows ragged, erratic, he’s losing control now, motions less smooth as he gets closer but still gentle, always gentle, he doesn’t know how to be anything less and it’s wonderful.

Heat spilling into me, the bucking jerk of his hips, the way he tips his head back, breathes my task name, so much of him to give me, to pump into me, so it’s a sensation of being filled, deep and satisfying. And then it’s over, almost, the sluggish way he comes to a stop, breathes hard, thighs shaking somewhat from the effort. His hand smooths over my belly, trailing through the wet glisten against my skin, smearing it over my cock as he gives me one final stroke, so that I shudder and shiver in delightful ways.

He’s careful, slow, slipping out of me gradually. I shift and untangle from him with huffed, sighing contentment, boneless and replete, satisfied, so fucking happy when he stretches out next to me, wraps an arm over me, bring me into his side and kisses my forehead. I find the places where I fit neatly, arm over his chest and cheek against his shoulder, and it’s so perfect that it makes me nervous, like trying to balance a fragile, expensive vase on a tiny fucking pedestal.

It’s just the soft pattern of our breath, easing down from the earlier racing, melting out into calm. I can hear his heart, strong and fast, equally slowing, so that it’s a soothing lull against my ear, so I could almost count the beats, match them to mine. I kiss the ridge of his collarbone, the hollow of his throat, the point of his jaw, overcome with the urge to lavish him with silent, eager joy.

“Mm?” He pats my shoulder, rolls his head toward me, startles like he was drifting asleep. “Deimos,” he says, thick and heavy. And then again, with more clarity, somber in a way I mistrust. “Deimos.”

I draw back some, wanting to look at him, so I’m the one brushing hair from his face, from both sides, even the scarred over ruin. The touch of my fingers is light, quick, nervous, so that he catches my hand and brings my knuckles to his lips. He speaks into the press of my skin, so I can both hear the words and feel them. “The whole time I was in the brig, I thought about you.”

My brow works at him, dipping, hunching, worried because he sounds worried, so it’s like I’m just mirroring his expression, replicating his emotions.

He pulls me to him, laying me against his chest again, turning so he can wrap himself over me. “I thought about what you said. About … Sacha.” Like if he says the wrong name it’s less real, it’s something we can discuss calmly, like it isn’t something that fills me with cold dread.

He senses it, the way I tense against him, the sudden way I go stiff and unyielding. He pets at me, soothing, kissing my hair. “I’m not upset. I’m not, Deimos, really. I understand. I don’t have to replace him, if that’s what you need. What you want. I just want – Deimos, the whole time I was in the brig, I kept thinking about if I lost you. If you’d bled out at medical and they couldn’t save you in time.”

He strokes a hand over my hair, kisses at the top of my head. “So I love you, I really do. I love you, Deimos.”

Nothing, just silence, I’m hardly breathing, so still against him it’s like I really did bleed out in medical, like nothing ever happened after that horrible night in the maintenance passages. I shudder, he hugs me, and it’s then I realize that he isn’t expecting anything from me. He’s relaxed, easy about it, petting at my hair and holding me, content just to have told me this, happy just to have me in his arms. To be with me.

“Love Sacha,” I say at last. Grudgingly, full of sorrow and regret, bitterness, self-loathing, everything that makes his arms tighten, makes some wet sound from his throat, but he just nods, accepting it, understanding because that’s how he is, that’s how he wants it to be. I push toward him, nudge his cheek with my nose, make him lower his face so we can kiss. It’s warm and slow, gentle, because that’s also how he is, how this is going to be.

I rest my lips against his ear. Just my little rasp,  saying something beautiful. “Love you more.”

 

 

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**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading! <3


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